The property golden visa closed in 2023 and has not reopened

What was removed, and on what date

Three qualifying investments went at once, for new applications made from 7 October 2023:

• the acquisition of real estate of at least €500,000*, source: Diário da República, removed 7 October 2023, read August 26, 2026;
• the acquisition and rehabilitation of property of at least €350,000*, source: Diário da República, removed 7 October 2023, read August 26, 2026;
• the pure capital transfer of at least €1,500,000*, source: Diário da República, removed 7 October 2023, read August 26, 2026.

The amendment was to articles 3.º and 90.º-A of Lei n.º 23/2007, the immigration act, and was later carried into the consolidated text by Decreto-Lei n.º 37-A/2024. The closure and its date are corroborated across independent legal analyses and are not contested by anyone.

The bar is wider than the direct purchase, and this is the part that gets missed

The law did not only delete the property line items. It provides that qualifying investment activity may not be directed, whether directly or indirectly, at real estate investment.

That wording does the real damage. It takes out the fund route as a workaround, because a collective investment undertaking whose portfolio is exposed to real estate is investment directed indirectly at real estate. A great deal of marketing between 2023 and now has offered funds as the way to keep the property route alive under a different label. The statute anticipated the label.

What is still open

The ARI itself was not abolished. The routes that remain available to new applicants are:

• units in non-real-estate collective investment undertakings, commonly at €500,000*, source: Diário da República, read August 26, 2026, with a minimum fund maturity of five years*, source: Diário da República, read August 26, 2026 and at least 60%*, source: Diário da República, read August 26, 2026 of the portfolio invested in companies headquartered in Portugal;
• capital into Portuguese companies combined with the creation or maintenance of jobs;
• investment in research within the national scientific and technological system;
• support for artistic production or for the national cultural heritage.

None of these is a property purchase, and none of them can be turned back into one by structuring, which is the whole point of the indirect-exposure bar.

What a pre-October-2023 holder keeps

Permits granted under the previous regime, including permits obtained through real estate, are expressly preserved and may be renewed on their original basis. The repeal operates on new applications; it does not reach back into a permit already issued.

So an investor who bought a Funchal apartment in 2021 under the old rules holds something that can no longer be created. That is worth stating plainly in both directions: it protects the existing holder, and it is not a reason for anyone to believe the route is still purchasable.

Madeira never had a golden visa of its own

The ARI is national. There was never a Madeira programme, a regional threshold, an island quota or a low-density carve-out specific to the archipelago, and nothing about buying in Funchal, Calheta or Santana ever produced a residence right that buying in Lisbon did not.

What is genuinely regional about a Madeira purchase is fiscal, not migratory: the Region applies its own IMT brackets rather than the mainland table, and a buyer who is not tax-resident in Portugal is charged a flat rate on housing instead of either table, which is one of several places where mainland guidance quietly gives the wrong number. The residence question, for anyone who is not an EU citizen, now runs entirely through the ordinary D-visa routes.

Why agencies still answer this search

An agency advertising a Madeira property that comes with a golden visa is describing a regime that ended in 2023. It can appear outright in the listing. More often the phrasing is softer: residency options available, a path to residency, or golden visa eligible. The property is real; the entitlement attached to it is not.

The honest version is short. Buying a house here is a good reason to buy a house here. It has not been a route to a residence permit since 7 October 2023, and someone whose plan depends on the permit needs a different instrument entirely. Whether they should also expect a Portuguese passport at the end of it is a separate question that got longer in 2026.

What could not be confirmed for this page

The dre.pt HTML viewer serves a JavaScript application shell to non-browser clients, so Lei n.º 56/2023 was read in the official PDF of the Diário da República, 1.ª série, n.º 194 of 6 October 2023. The URL is given here so it can be checked in a browser, and the substance was corroborated across multiple independent legal analyses of the amendment.

That is a weaker basis than the primary-text reading behind most of the numbers on this site, and it is stated rather than hidden. What is not in doubt is the closure itself, its date, and the indirect-exposure bar. What deserves confirmation against the consolidated Lei n.º 23/2007 before anyone acts is the current wording of the routes that remain open, since those have been amended since 2023.