Why some visa thresholds have no published number
A salary threshold set by law as a formula is not the same thing as a salary threshold you can quote. Portugal and Spain both show why — for different reasons.
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.
Spain: the number is administrative, not legal
Spain's Highly Qualified Professional route does not set its salary bar in the text of any law. The threshold is decided by the criteria of the Unidad de Grandes Empresas — a unit of the tax administration — and those criteria are not published as a single citable figure the way a statute would be. Advisers quote numbers from experience with cases, not from a page they can link to.
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 INE wage statistics that lands over €30,000. The European Commission's own migration portal, which should be the simplest reference, still shows a figure that has clearly not been updated in years.
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
Where the formula is real but the current value is not verifiable, we say so and stop — that is Portugal's visa page, which does not exist, rather than existing with a number we would have to defend. Where a country has no visa page but does have a verifiable tax regime or income tax scale, we publish those instead: Portugal's IRS bands and its IFICI regime both come from primary legal sources with dates attached, and neither has this problem.
A missing page is a smaller failure than a wrong number stated with false confidence. That trade-off is deliberate.
This page is information, not advice. We are not an employer, a recruitment agency, a visa centre or an immigration adviser, and we are not affiliated with any government body. Rules change — confirm against the official source before you act.