I am married to a Portuguese citizen or in a união de facto

Two routes that are not interchangeable

Marriage and união de facto are distinct legal bases, however close they may be in daily life. The first rests on the marital tie; the second on recognition of the união de facto — a Portuguese legal instrument we keep untranslated, because no English term names the same figure.

Registry offices usually publish them on separate lines, with dates that can be far apart. That is why the estimate form asks which of the two is your case before showing any result: it is a question only you can answer, and without it the comparison would come from the wrong queue.

Within each of them there can still be a split by registration route — transcription or direct registration — and by stage, between review and decision.

How to follow the movement

The full calendar shows the month-by-month history of each of these queues. That is where you see whether the queue for your case has been moving steadily, whether it stalled for a stretch, or whether it moved backwards because of a redistribution of batches between services.

A steady history produces a narrower estimate window. An irregular history produces a wide one — and that width is information about the queue, not imprecision in the calculation.

How to read the date published for this case

The date a registry office publishes is the submission date of the applications the sector is working on in that reference month — it is not a completion date or a forecast of a decision. When the email says “second half of March 2024”, it is saying the sector has reached the applications submitted in that window.

The comparison this site makes is a subtraction between two dates: the date your application was submitted and the date published for the queue. The result is the distance between them, in months. If the published date has not yet reached yours, there is a gap still to cover; if it has passed, the queue is ahead of your submission. Neither of those two sentences says anything about what happened to a specific application.

Registry offices state that applications are reviewed in order of submission date, within the relevant sector, according to the legal basis invoked. That order is what makes the comparison useful at all — and it is also why picking the wrong queue ruins the result, even with the arithmetic done right.

Where this reading stops being valid

A queue describes a group; you are one case. Document requests, requests for clarification, formal opinions and checks take individual applications out of submission order, and none of that shows up in a queue publication. That is why this site never states that an application is under review, has been decided, or will be completed on a given date.

On top of that, the reference month of the email is already in the past by the time the message arrives, not every queue is published every month, and a redistribution of batches between services can make the published date move backwards. The site shows those gaps and reversals instead of smoothing them over with estimates.

To confirm the actual stage of an application — submitted, under review, awaiting decision or completed — consult the official information from the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado (IRN).

Common mistakes when reading these dates

• Using the marriage queue for a união de facto application, or the other way round.
• Comparing the transcription date with the direct-registration date as if they were the same queue.
• Averaging review and decision: they are two stages, each with its own date.
• Concluding there was a delay because the published date did not move in a month with no publication.

Frequently asked questions