If you have ever tried calling AIMA, you know the drill. Some people dialed a thousand times in a single day just to get the call to actually connect. When you finally heard the hold music start, it felt like a small victory. Then came the real fear: that the call would drop, and you’d have to start all over again from zero.

From endless phone calls to one channel

That routine is mostly gone now. Not because it got easier, but because AIMA moved almost everything away from the phone. Call today and you’ll usually get through to someone, which is already an improvement on its own. But that person can only point you back to the website or the contact form. No operator can act on your case directly over the phone anymore. Whatever needs doing goes through AIMA’s online channels now, full stop.

It’s a genuine shift, and in its own way it reflects real effort. AIMA issued around 386,000 residency permits in 2025, a 60% jump over 2024. This is a large, old-fashioned administration trying to digitise decades of process almost overnight, under enormous public pressure. The backlog is real and frustrating, but so is the effort behind fixing it.

Thinking about legal action? A few things have changed

For years, an urgent court action asking a judge to order AIMA to move on a stalled case was the fastest way to force progress. That is changing, and it’s worth being honest about why: the approach became so effective that huge numbers of people started using it, and the courts themselves are now backlogged as a result.

The numbers tell the story. The court backlog for AIMA-related cases grew from around 50,000 in June 2025 to over 130,000 by early 2026. A special task force of 28 judges was assigned to clear it, and between April and June 2026 they resolved roughly 22,000 cases, about 20% of the backlog at the time. Genuine progress, but new filings are still arriving faster than even that pace can absorb.

What this means in practice: once a judge rules, AIMA is still typically ordered to act within 15 to 30 days, backed by daily fines if they don’t. That part hasn’t changed. What has changed is the wait for the ruling itself, which now commonly takes 8 to 10 weeks. It remains a real option for a case that has genuinely stalled. It’s just no longer the near-instant fix it once was.

A faster first step: AIMA’s own contact form

Before going anywhere near a courtroom, it’s worth knowing about AIMA’s official contact form, the channel that quietly replaced the phone. In our experience handling cases through it, it deserves more credit than it usually gets: when it works, which is most of the time, it works genuinely well, and it covers a lot more ground than people expect. Among the things we regularly see it used for:

• Requesting a first appointment if you have a visa but haven’t received one yet, typically answered within 2 to 3 weeks.
• Requesting an earlier appointment date if your current one is scheduled far out (up to a year isn’t unusual), though there’s no reliable timeframe for a response either way.
• Changing personal details already on file, such as your address, name, or NIF.
• Changing the type of permit you hold, for example moving from a student permit to a work-related one.
• Specific requests for EU citizens, including family reunification and permanent residence applications.

That last category has had a mixed history. For a long time, EU citizens requesting family reunification got no response at all, even after repeated attempts, before that particular request type settled down and now works reliably. Permanent residence requests are still going through their own rough patch: one bug we see regularly asks for your current permit’s expiry date, then tells you that you can only apply once your permit has expired, even when it already has. When something like this breaks, getting it resolved can take a frustratingly long time.

One practical note: the form is generally reported to work best, and sometimes only, when accessed from within Portugal. If you’re applying from abroad and run into trouble, that’s worth keeping in mind before assuming something else is wrong.

None of this should take away from the bigger picture. Portugal asks a certain amount of patience from anyone settling here, at more than just AIMA’s door, and the contact form is a real, working example of the agency trying to close that gap. It costs nothing to try, and for the right kind of request, it can move things along well before a lawsuit would even reach a judge.

So which option is actually right for you?

As a rough guide: if you simply haven’t gotten an appointment yet, or your situation fits one of the many things the contact form handles, start there. It costs nothing, and when it works, it works quickly. If you’ve already tried that route and gone months without any real movement, or your case has genuinely stalled with no clear next step, that’s when legal action starts to make sense. It’s rarely the first move, and it shouldn’t need to be. We’ve seen both paths play out enough times to help you tell the difference.

How we can help

If any of this sounds like your situation and you’re not sure which way to go, we’re happy to talk it through, even if the honest answer is “give the contact form a try first.” You can read more about how we support clients through AIMA delays on our AIMA Lawsuit service page, or simply get in touch.