For families planning as much for their children’s futures as their own, where a young person can study, work and belong is often decided by a residency choice made years before.
In the 2021/22 academic year, the cost of a university place changed overnight for thousands of European students. A French teenager could once study in Britain at the local price. After Brexit, that ended. Most students from the EU were reclassified as international, and the bill rose sharply. Suddenly a passport meant far more than travel.
That shift explains a question we hear often from parents, who ask less about their own future than their children’s. EU citizenship for children is not an abstract perk. It is a concrete asset that follows a child into adulthood, shaping where they study, what they pay, and where they’re free to build a career. It can outlast almost everything else on the balance sheet.
| The lasting value of a Golden Visa is measured less in years of residency than in the doors a European passport can open for the next generation. |
What EU citizenship for children actually gives a family
Residency and citizenship are not the same thing, and for the young the difference between them matters more than almost anything else. A residence permit lets a family live in Portugal and travel freely across the Schengen Area. Citizenship goes further. Under European Union law, a Portuguese passport is a European one, carrying the right to live, study and work in any of the 27 member states on the same footing as a local.
For a child, that’s a wide field. Picture a girl who is fifteen years old today, with her whole education still ahead of her. With a European passport in hand a decade from now, she might read medicine in Lisbon, take a master’s in Amsterdam, then start a first job in Berlin with no visa, no work permit, and no sponsor. None of those moves would need sign-off from an immigration office. The passport is the permission.
There is one more feature, and parents tend to prize it above all the rest of the programme’s benefits. Citizenship, unlike a visa, doesn’t lapse when circumstances shift. It passes down. The future children of a Portuguese citizen are generally Portuguese as well, which is why families treat this as planning for several generations rather than one.
What does EU citizenship mean for university fees?
For EU citizens, universities across the European Union charge the same subsidised fees that locals pay. Non-EU students usually pay much higher international rates. In the Netherlands, for instance, the statutory fee for EU students sits near 2,600 euros a year, while international students can pay anywhere from 9,000 to 30,000 euros.
That gap is no rounding error. For many families, it decides whether a particular degree stays affordable at all, or slips quietly out of reach.
Take the Dutch example in full. The government sets a single statutory fee, the wettelijk collegegeld, for students from the EU and the wider European Economic Area. It came to 2,601 euros for the 2025/26 year. Students from outside the bloc pay an institutional fee that each university sets for itself, which commonly runs between 9,000 and 30,000 euros a year, and climbs higher for medicine and dentistry. Over a three-year bachelor’s degree, that difference can exceed the price of a small flat.
Several countries go further still. Public universities in Germany charge no tuition for most programmes, for local and international students alike, and a number of Nordic states reserve free or heavily subsidised places for EU and EEA citizens. An EU passport does not only lower what a family pays for a child’s university degree. In parts of Europe, it erases the cost entirely.
Beyond fees: the full reach of EU university access
Money is the headline. Yet EU university access is about much more than a smaller invoice at the start of each academic year. It changes how freely a young person can move through European education.
An EU citizen applies to universities in other member states as a local would, not as an overseas applicant. The barriers fall away. There is no student visa to secure, no immigration appointment, and no limit on the hours a student may work alongside their course. Graduates can stay on to look for work.
They may also move to another member state to job-hunt, with no fresh permit required. Erasmus+ is open to them too. That European exchange scheme funds a term or a full year of study abroad, a door that shut for British students after Brexit. The UK has since agreed to rejoin the scheme from 2027.
The Brexit lesson: what the loss revealed
If you want to measure the value of EU citizenship, the clearest way is to watch what happens when it is suddenly taken away. Brexit ran that experiment in plain sight.
Before 2021, students from the EU at British universities paid home fees and could borrow through the student loan system. From the 2021/22 year, most paid full international fees instead. The effect was swift. EU enrolments at UK universities roughly halved, falling from about 152,900 in 2020/21 to around 74,500 by 2023/24, according to figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency reported by Times Higher Education. International undergraduate fees in the UK now run from roughly 11,000 to more than 40,000 pounds a year, against a home cap near 9,250 pounds.
The loss ran both ways. British families, who once had cheap access to universities across the continent, found their own children reclassified as international students in Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam. Mobility that had felt permanent turned out to rest on a status that one political decision could remove. That is the lesson worth keeping. For families weighing a second citizenship today, a European passport is insurance against exactly this kind of sudden change.
From residency to citizenship: the ten-year horizon
None of this arrives on day one. A Golden Visa begins as residency, and citizenship is a later milestone that a family becomes eligible to apply for over time.
Here the rules have just changed, and the change is significant. Under Portugal’s new Nationality Law, Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026, in force since 19 May 2026, most foreign nationals become eligible to apply for citizenship after ten years of legal residence. EU and Portuguese-speaking nationals qualify after seven years. The clock now starts when the first residence permit is issued, rather than when the application is filed. This replaced a five-year rule that had stood for years, so anyone reading older brochures should treat the five-year figure as out of date.
Ten years is a long horizon, and it asks for honesty rather than salesmanship. Citizenship is never automatic. Applicants need to meet conditions set at the time, including an A2 level of Portuguese, and approval rests with the authorities, not with us. Transitional details for residents already in the system are still being clarified, which is why we ask families to confirm their own position with an independent immigration lawyer before planning around any date.
For a family thinking a generation ahead, though, ten years is not the obstacle it first seems. A child who is eight when the first permit is issued is eighteen when the family becomes eligible to apply, just as university decisions come into view. The timeline and the goal line up rather well.
A second option for the whole family
A Portugal Golden Visa is rarely taken out for one person. It is a family decision. It is built to carry the whole household along, which is part of why parents treat it as a choice for the next generation, not just for themselves.
A single application can include a spouse or partner, dependent children, and in some cases dependent parents. The rights are equal for all of them. Each person included becomes eligible to apply for citizenship on exactly the same timeline as the main applicant. For many families, that is the real draw of a secondary Golden Visa for the family as a single unit: one process, one investment, and the same set of family benefits for everyone under the same roof.
Those options tend to matter most when plans change. A second residency, and in time a second citizenship, gives a family room to move if circumstances at home shift, whether for study, for work, or simply for peace of mind. The qualifying route is a minimum of 500,000 euros into a CMVM-regulated fund, held throughout, with capital at risk. Just a week a year in Portugal is needed. The financial commitment is real, and so is the breadth of what it can secure for the people who come after you.
Families who plan this way are not chasing a passport for its own sake. They are trying to widen the choices open to their children, long after the parents have stopped choosing for them. It might be a degree taken without a mountain of international fees, or a first job in a city two countries from home, reached without a single form. The door to Europe stays open.
That is the real inheritance: not a document, but a wider life.
As you are interested in this topic, you will also be interested in learning why Americans are leaving the US and why Portugal is always mentioned.
Where to start
If you are early in your thinking and simply want to understand how the Portugal programme works for families, that’s exactly the right moment to start reading. There is no rush at all. Our overview of why Portugal appeals to families and our guide to what residency provides are good next steps. For families looking further ahead at where to base themselves, our region-by-region read and our moving to Portugal checklist cover the practical side. When you are ready, get in touch for a relaxed, no-pressure conversation.
Elite Golden Visa provides immigration consultancy services. We do not provide financial or legal advice. All legal services are delivered by independent, qualified immigration lawyers. All investment decisions should be made with independent financial advice.
