Things to do after your SEF appointment in Portugal

You have your Portuguese residency permit card, now what?

It has been a long wait, and you might even be feeling a bit cooped up due to restrictions on your travel outside Portugal while on your D7 visa. But now that you finally have your Portuguese residency card (the Título de Residência) in hand, you can wrap up some important loose ends.

But first, some more bureaucracy

Fortunately, you are near the end of the most intense phase of bureaucracy you’ve likely dealt with. Three main items remain:

1. Visit their local centro de saude (government run health center) to register with the SNS and get your SNS number.
2. Update your NIF records with your new address.
3. Sign up for the NHR tax program, which is optional, but most people do it. Some of you may need to exchange your USA driver's license at this point, and others may have more specific tax matters to address since you are now an official tax resident of Portugal. But everyone typically addresses with these three items.

Get your SNS number

Even though you have private health insurance as a condition for your residency permit under the D7, there are still important reasons to register with the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS), Portugal’s national health service.

• SNS hospitals handle critical and chronic care needs, even for people with private health insurance. While the private system is your first option, you may at some point need to interact with an SNS clinic, doctor or hospital, so best to be prepared.
• An SNS number gets you access to the best prices for prescription medicine. Without your SNS number, you’ll pay “full retail”. While these prices are still much better than what you would typically see in the USA, having an SNS number gives you access to the best prices, even at private pharmacies.
• You’ll be more integrated into the Portuguese healthcare system. Having an SNS number will often simplify the process at hospitals and pharmacies, since you will no longer be an outlier.

Update your NIF records

Once you have received your residency card, or Título de Residência, you can update your NIF to reflect your current Portuguese address and also remove the fiscal representative you used when you originally got your NIF. You can make this change by visiting your local Finanças office (Portugal’s tax agency), or you can follow the instructions in this helpful article from bordr.io to complete the process online. You can scan or photograph the front and back of your Título de Residência card and submit that image file as proof of your new address. look into creating a sidebar HTML element for questions like this

When do you become a tax resident? Any one of these will trigger your Portuguese tax residency.

1. Reside in Portugal for more than 183 days, consecutive or otherwise, in any 12-month period starting or ending in the calendar year concerned.
2. Change the address on your NIF to your Portuguese address.
3. Once you move into your Portuguese home (purchased home, rental, etc…) under circumstances which imply your intention to keep and occupy that home as your permanent residence. to become a tax resident is one of 2 ways. 1 is to be in Portugal 183 days or more on a 12 months period and the second one and very important is if less than that time ( 183 days) but have an adress in Portugal in conditions to suppose to use as your habitual adress, you will also be considered a tax resident. In your case and being a rax resident for 2 1/2 months, you should report taxes in Portugal for that period

Sign up for the NHR tax program

Timing is critical when it comes to registering for the Portuguese Non-Habitual Resident tax program, or NHR. The NHR application must be submitted only after the registration as a resident in the Portuguese territory. In addition, you must register before March 31 of the year after you get your Título de Residência. If you miss that deadline, you are out of luck. For example, my wife and I got residency in December 2022. My Título de Residência card arrived that month, and my wife got her card in January 2023. However, both of our cards expire in December 2024, so we became residents in December 2022. As a result, we must register for the NHR by no later than March 31, 2023, and we each must register separately.
Fortunately, this can be done entirely online, and is a fairly easy process. As is often the case, the Americans & FriendsPT Facebook group provides some excellent resources on this process, including a PDF from the Portuguese government in English describing the process.