Why some visa thresholds have no published number

Most of the numbers on this site come from a page a government publishes and updates every year: a specific figure, in a specific currency, with a date. Two of the six countries we cover do not work that way, and the reason is worth explaining rather than papering over. One of the two has since changed, and the correction is below rather than quietly folded into the text.

Spain: one of the two routes now has a rule, and we missed it

This page used to say that Spain sets no salary bar for its highly qualified route anywhere in law, and that the figure lives only in the internal criteria of an administrative unit. That was already wrong when we published it, by more than six months.

Spain runs two highly qualified routes under the same law, and we wrote about them as if they were one. For the EU Blue Card, a ministerial order published on 30 January 2026 sets the bar as 1.4 times the average gross annual earnings per worker measured by the national statistics institute, with a reduction coefficient of 0.8 in two named cases. That is a rule anyone can open and check. Our Spain visa page now carries it, along with the arithmetic that turns the multiplier into a euro figure.

Two things about that order are worth more than the number it produces. It states no euro amount at all, so every page quoting one — ours included — is publishing a derivation. And it says that when the statistics institute releases a new edition of the survey, the new bar applies to applications filed from one month after publication. The threshold therefore changes without the rule changing, on a date that is not the date the statistics appear.

Spain: the other route, where we were wrong a second time

This page then said that the national authorisation for highly qualified professionals — the same law, a different permission — had no published threshold at all. The evidence was the government's own information sheet for that authorisation, which leaves the salary section blank and notes that it will be completed once the instruction governing it is published.

That sheet is still blank. The number exists anyway. In June 2026 the same ministry published a two-page update, linked from the "other information of interest" section of a neighbouring page, which states a single threshold of €41,356.36 for the national authorisation under article 71.2.b and says in as many words that no reduced threshold applies to it. Our Spain page now carries it, and so does a full comparison of the two routes.

The lesson is narrow and worth stating precisely, because we would have made the same mistake again without it: an empty section on an authority’s web page is not evidence that the authority has published nothing. A department can run an up-to-date internal PDF and a stale public page at the same time, and the PDF is not always the harder document to find — it was one click away, under a heading we had not opened.

It also means the amounts on this site have a second failure mode beyond being wrong: being right and then quietly expiring. The Blue Card figure did exactly that for three months. Every threshold page here now carries the date we last opened the source, which is the only honest way to publish a number that moves without warning.

Portugal: the formula is in the law, the euro figure is not

Portugal is the opposite problem. Its EU Blue Card threshold is written directly into the law — Lei n.º 23/2007, article 121-B — as 1.5 times the national average gross annual salary, or 1.2 times for professions in shortage. That is a real, citable legal formula.

What is missing is agreement on what that formula currently equals in euros. Searching for the figure turns up at least three different numbers from apparently serious sources: €15,960, €21,030, and a calculation from current wage statistics that lands above €30,000. The European Commission's own migration portal, which should be the simplest reference, still shows a figure that has plainly not been updated in years.

We went looking for the document that would settle it. It does not do that.

The immigration agency lists the legal basis for this route itself: articles 121.º-A and following of the immigration act, article 60.º(2) of Decree-Regulation 84/2007, and Portaria 1563/2007. The last of those looked like the obvious home for a published amount, and three earlier attempts to find the figure had assumed it was there.

It is not there, and it never was. Portaria 1563/2007 regulates something else entirely: the general means-of-subsistence requirement for foreign nationals, expressed against the national minimum wage, with shares of 100%, 50% and 30% per household member. The phrase "cartão azul" does not occur in it. It could not — the regulation dates from 2007, before the Blue Card existed in Portuguese law at all.

That turns a failed search into an answer. The multiplier is in the law. The statistic the multiplier applies to is not identified by any of the cited acts — no publisher, no named series, no reference year. That is why serious sources disagree: they are not reading one document differently, they are each choosing a different wage statistic and multiplying it.

Why we do not just pick one

We could report any of those three numbers with a citation and move on — every visa comparison site we found while researching this did exactly that, and none of them agree with each other. That would give the page the appearance of precision it does not have. The entire premise of this site is that a figure you read here should be traceable to a source you can open and confirm yourself. A number three sources disagree on fails that test even with a link attached.

What we publish instead

Portugal's Blue Card page now exists and carries the multiplier, the six-month contract requirement, the legal basis, and no euro amount — along with the advice to get the figure in writing from the employer or the agency before relying on it. That is the honest shape of this one: a page that tells you precisely what is knowable and precisely what is not.

Where a formula's value can be derived from a published statistic, we publish the derivation and show the working instead, which is what Spain allows and Portugal does not. And where a country has a verifiable tax regime or income tax scale, we publish those regardless: Portugal's IRS bands and its IFICI regime both come from primary legal sources with dates attached, and neither has this problem.

A page that says "this is not published, here is why, and here is what to do about it" is more useful than a number stated with false confidence. That trade-off is deliberate.