What this says, in one page

You can go. Portugal is open to you, and the route is the D8 remote work visa, with one of you as the main applicant and the other accompanying as a de facto partner. Nothing about being unmarried closes the door.

What being unmarried does is remove your margin for error. A married couple can file in almost any order and end up in the same place. You cannot. There are two legal routes for the partner who does not qualify independently, they look similar from the outside, and they are about two years apart in practice. Almost every article you will read describes the slow one, because it is the one that applies to people who are already living abroad.

The second thing that decides real money has nothing to do with immigration. If you sell the US house after Portuguese tax residence has begun, Portugal taxes half the gain at rates rising to 48 percent, and the US exclusion that saves you from American tax is exactly what destroys the credit that would have offset the Portuguese bill. Sell first, then move.

Your income is comfortably sufficient, but only one of you can carry it. One of you is at roughly 1.9 times the threshold and the other at about 0.55 times, so two independent applications will not work. That is not a problem, it is simply the reason the partner route matters so much.

The short answers

Your situation as we understood it

Two US citizens, no other nationality and no European ancestry, together 21 years and never married, with no registered partnership anywhere.

One of you, aged 56, is a salaried employee of a US company earning USD 96,000, with written agreement from that employer to work remotely from abroad. The other, aged 53, does freelance design work averaging USD 28,000, evidenced by 1099 forms and bank deposits, with no long term client contracts. Combined savings of USD 180,000, plus US retirement accounts, and a US home you intend to sell. You speak English only. You want to move in about nine months, with Portugal as your first choice and Spain as a maybe.

Throughout this document we call the higher earner Person A and the freelancer Person B, because which of you is which changes the entire structure of the application.

Three things in that list shape everything that follows. You are not married, which decides the route. Person A's income is employment income from a foreign employer, which decides both the visa category and a tax question most people never think about. And you own a US home you have not yet sold, which is where the largest single sum of money in this document sits.

What you are worried about

You told us: "We are not married and everyone tells us it will be fine. Will it?"

Mostly yes, and the people telling you so are right about the destination and wrong about the road. Portuguese law recognises an unmarried partnership by name, and it does so in unusually generous terms.

That phrase, "or outside it", is doing enormous work for you. It means your 21 years in the United States count. You do not have to live in Portugal first to build a recognised partnership there.

The qualifying period is two years of living in conditions analogous to spouses, and there is no requirement anywhere in the statute that those two years happen on Portuguese soil.

This matters because most guidance assumes you need a declaration from a Portuguese junta de freguesia, which is a parish office and only serves its own residents. You cannot get one from the United States. You do not need one.

So the honest answer to your question is that being unmarried is not the problem. Not knowing that there are two routes is the problem, and that is the next chapter.

The one place where being unmarried genuinely bites

There is a soft spot in the law that no article we found mentions, and you should know about it because it is the ground on which a refusal would be argued.

The simultaneous filing route is created by the statute at Article 58.º n.º 5, which permits an accompanying visa for family members na aceção do n.º 1 do artigo 99.º, that is, as defined in Article 99.º n.º 1. Article 99.º n.º 1 lists the spouse and children. It does not mention de facto partners. It is the regulation beneath the statute that adds them.

In practice the regulation is what consulates apply, and the Ministry's own visa portal lists the de facto partner explicitly. But a regulation that reaches further than the statute it implements is legally arguable, and we could find no case law testing it. This is a small risk, not a likely one, and it is the single best reason to get the consulate's position in writing before you file.

Note also a difference in wording that is easy to miss. Article 98.º says the spouse tem direito, has the right. Article 100.º says the partner pode ser autorizado, may be authorised. Right against discretion. You are asking for something that can be granted rather than something that must be.

Where you actually qualify

Route 1: Portugal, D8 remote work visa with an accompanying partner

What it is. A national residence visa for people performing work remotely for employers or clients based outside Portugal. Person A applies as the main applicant. Person B applies at the same time, at the same consulate, as an accompanying family member.

Whether you qualify. The income requirement is four times the Portuguese minimum wage, as an average over the three months before you apply.

Conversions use 1 EUR = 1.1467 USD, the consular rate published for July 2026. We were only able to read that rate from an indexed document heading rather than the document body, so treat every dollar conversion in this table as needing a recheck against a live rate before you rely on it.

Person B cannot carry a D8 alone. At roughly 0.55 times the threshold, B is short by about EUR 1,645 a month. Two independent applications are not an option. That is why the accompanying route is not a convenience here, it is the whole plan.

A naming trap that will waste your time. The Portuguese Embassy in Washington DC labels the remote work visa D9 on its own checklist index, and uses D8 for accompanying a family member. That is the reverse of how the rest of the internet uses those labels. Ask for the wrong one and you will be given the wrong form.

What it costs.

Documents are the rest of it: FBI identity history summaries, apostilles on those and on birth certificates, certified translations, and health insurance for the visa. We did not find official published prices for the translation and apostille steps, which vary by state and by translator, so budget EUR 1,200 to EUR 2,500 for the pair of you and treat that as an estimate rather than a sourced figure.

How long it takes. Three separate waits, and only the middle one is published.

1. Consulate appointment. Not published by anyone. Portuguese residence visa applications in the US run through VFS Global, and neither VFS nor the Ministry publishes queue data. Reports for 2026 cluster around seven weeks to three months, with Miami slowest. We could not verify this from any official source and you should not plan tightly around it.
2. Visa processing. A 60 day decision deadline is widely attributed to Article 58.º of Lei n.º 23/2007. We could not read that article at source, so we flag it as unconfirmed.
3. Conversion in Portugal. The visa is valid for two entries and four months, within which you apply to AIMA for the residence permit itself. The Ministry books that AIMA appointment at the moment it issues your visa, and prints the booking link on the visa sticker.

On the AIMA backlog you will have read about: the recovery task force created by Resolução do Conselho de Ministros n.º 87/2024 closed on 31 December 2025, having issued over 300,000 residence titles and processed 97 percent of the files it was set up to clear. Press reporting in July 2026 puts the remainder at around 30,000 files. That queue is for expressions of interest and renewals, which is a different queue from a new arrival converting a consular visa, so it tells you less about your own wait than the headlines suggest.

Route 2: Spain, international teleworker visa

Worth ranking second because it solves your partner problem in a completely different way, and because Person A's situation fits it exactly.

Spain does not require you to register as a pareja de hecho, which is fortunate, because you could not. Registration generally requires prior residence in the relevant region, and Madrid for example demands twelve months of joint registration on the local rolls. Non residents are structurally excluded. The teleworker route sidesteps this entirely.

Twenty one years clears a one year test comfortably, and you will have decades of the documents it asks for.

Income is 200 percent of the Spanish minimum wage for the main applicant plus 75 percent for the second person.

There is genuine ambiguity in how that is computed. Annualising the 14 payments gives EUR 1,424.50 a month, so the pair of you would need about EUR 3,917 a month or roughly EUR 47,000 a year. Reading 200 percent off the headline monthly figure instead gives EUR 2,442. Person A clears either. We could not establish which computation each consulate applies, so plan on the higher number.

Route 3: Netherlands, and the structural trick worth knowing

The Netherlands treats unmarried partners better than either Portugal or Spain. There is a dedicated application for residence with an unmarried partner, form B07002E, requiring no registration and no cohabitation agreement, only proof of a durable exclusive relationship. Partners of self employed sponsors get full labour market access from day one, and US nationals are exempt from the civic integration exam taken abroad.

The obstacle is that the Dutch American Friendship Treaty route requires you to be self employed, and Person A is a salaried employee. To sponsor Person B, a treaty holder must show about EUR 2,524 a month gross, well above the EUR 1,767 needed for their own permit.

Here is the part worth remembering: you are both US citizens, so you can both file under the treaty independently. Two permits, EUR 4,500 each, and the partner question disappears completely. Against USD 180,000 in savings the capital requirement is trivial. It requires Person B to evidence about EUR 1,767 a month of gross profit, which is close to what B currently earns, so it is not automatic. But it converts a dependency problem into two ordinary applications, and no other country on your list offers that.

Routes we ruled out, and why

• Portugal D7. You clear the D7 income threshold by about six and a half times and it is still the wrong visa. The consular checklist for the "living on your own income" branch requires income from movable or immovable property, intellectual property, or financial investments. A salary is not that, and freelance design fees are not that. You would pass the number and fail the character test.
• Spain, non lucrative visa. Prohibits work. Person A cannot keep the US job on it.
• Ireland. Looks attractive because it is English speaking. It is a dead end. A de facto partner application needs an eligible sponsor, meaning an Irish or UK national resident in Ireland or a holder of Stamp 1, 4 or 5. Person A cannot become any of those: Stamp 1 needs an Irish employer, Ireland has no digital nomad visa, and Stamp 0 expressly forbids working. The sequence never starts, however strong your relationship evidence is.
• Italy. Article 29 of Decreto Legislativo 286/1998 covers the spouse or a party to a civil union and contains no de facto partner category. Italy's convivenza di fatto is a civil registry status, not an immigration one. If you are an opposite sex couple there is no lawful mechanism for Person B short of marriage.
• Greece. Legally possible but gated. The digital nomad route recognises a cohabitant only where a cohabitation agreement has been concluded, and that agreement is executed before a Greek notary. We could not establish whether two US non residents can conclude one remotely or by power of attorney, so it probably requires a trip to Greece before you even apply. The income test is also EUR 4,200 a month net for a couple, the highest of any route here.

What could go wrong

What to do next

1. Confirm the prior marriage question this week. If either of you has an earlier marriage that is not fully and provably dissolved, stop and tell us, because it changes the route entirely.
2. Book the consulate appointment as soon as you have a target month. It is the longest and least predictable wait and nothing else on this list is blocked by it.
3. Write to the consulate asking what evidence of união de facto they accept for an accompanying visa from a couple who have never lived in Portugal. Keep the reply.
4. Open the employer conversation about permanent establishment. Give them Article 5(4) by name so their advisers can answer quickly.
5. Decide the home sale timing with a cross border tax adviser, and get the number for selling after residence begins rather than relying on the rule of thumb in this document.
6. Assemble the relationship file. A joint sworn declaration from both of you, notarised and apostilled, stating cohabitation in conditions analogous to spouses since a named date. Both long form birth certificates, apostilled. Then the supporting material the statute tells AIMA to weigh: joint leases and deeds across the years, joint accounts, joint tax filings, insurance beneficiary designations, wills and powers of attorney naming each other, utility bills at a shared address. If your state offers a registered domestic partnership, add it, apostilled. It is not required, but it is exactly the registration the statute contemplates.
7. Order FBI identity history summaries and start the apostille process.
8. Get Person B a Portuguese certificate of coverage once resident, and attach a copy to each US return. It exempts B from US self employment tax under the totalization agreement in force since 1 August 1989. B's Portuguese contributions are 21.4 percent of 70 percent of billings, and a first ever registration does not take effect until the first day of the twelfth month after starting activity, so there is a year's grace.

Sources and how to re-check them

Every rule we relied on, listed once, with the law it comes from and where to read it. Rules move. This table is what lets you verify this document in six months instead of trusting it.

A word on the second column, because it is the whole point of paying for this. We do not cite articles or advice sites. We cite the actual law, decree or ministerial order that creates the rule, by its number and date. That is what "Lei n.º 23/2007" and "Portaria n.º 91/2025/1" are. It means you can read the exact text yourself, and it means that when a rule changes you can see precisely what changed and when. Almost nothing else written about relocation does this, which is why so much of it is quietly out of date.

What we could not establish

Stated plainly, because you should know where the edges of this document are.

• The legal basis for the four times minimum wage D8 threshold. It is on the consular checklist and applied in practice, but we could not find it in any published Portaria or Decreto-Lei.
• Consulate appointment waiting times in the United States. Not published by the Ministry, the embassy or VFS Global.
• What evidence of união de facto US consulates accept in practice. The category exists and the regulation covers it. We could not read the Washington DC checklist document itself.
• Whether the 60 day visa decision deadline is correctly attributed to Article 58.º. Widely cited, not read at source.
• How many months of bank statements are required, whose name accounts must be in, and whether joint accounts count. No primary source specifies any of it.
• Whether Person A's US employer must itself register with Portuguese social security, or whether Person A can discharge the employer's share. There is an EU mechanism for this but the US agreement is not the EU regulation, and we found no Portuguese law or decree settling it. This is a live compliance question and the largest open item in the document.
• How Portugal characterises 401k and IRA withdrawals, as pension income under treaty Article 20 or as capital income. Genuinely contested, and materially different in outcome.
• The exchange rate. Read from a document heading rather than its body. Re-check before relying on any dollar figure here.

Two of the sources above are worth a specific warning. AIMA's own subsistence page still quotes the 2025 minimum wage of EUR 870 rather than the 2026 figure of EUR 920, and AIMA's family reunification checklist has not been updated for the reform that took effect in October 2025. Where a government website and the statute disagree, the statute governs.

What this is not

This is research into your situation as you described it, carried out against the law as it stood on the date on the cover. It is not legal advice, it is not immigration representation, and it is not a guarantee of any outcome. Decisions about your case are made by the authorities of the country concerned, applying rules that can change without notice. Where the stakes are high, use this document to have a shorter and better informed conversation with a qualified immigration lawyer in the destination country, not instead of one.

The tax chapter in particular identifies questions rather than answering all of them. Cross border tax for a US citizen abroad is one of the few areas where confident wrong answers routinely cost five figures, and several of the items above cannot be settled by research at all.

If anything here does not match your situation, reply to the delivery email and we will correct it.