Under the simplification of procedures, the Immigration and Borders Service (SEF) has available, as from today, the function of Automatic Renewal for about twenty-nine thousand residence permits expiring between 1 January and 31 March 2022, within compliance of the safety rules and mitigation of the consequences resulting from the health emergency situation.

One should remind that, on July 2020, SEF has released a new function at the “Personal Area" on Portal SEF where the citizen can have access to the “Automatic Renewal" of the corresponding residence permit with no need to attend at the reception desk.

Up to now, more than 161.000 automatic renewals have been carried out.

Following order no. 5793-A/2020 of 22 May 2020, establishing the implementation of a simplified procedure for examining residence permits applications, the Service has been adopting exceptional measures for the recovery of pending processes and the efficiency in documentary management of foreign nationals.

Amongst SEF's initiatives with the purpose to minimise the consequences resulting from the health emergency situation, the adoption of exceptional and temporary measures, it is the automatic renewal of residence permit initiative the one with the most impact, allowing a recovery of pending processes and a gain in efficiency in documentary management of foreign nationals.