Dual Citizenship With Portugal: Do I Have to Give Up My US Passport?

No. Becoming Portuguese does not require you to renounce American citizenship, and nothing in the Portuguese process asks you to hand over, cancel or surrender your US passport. Portugal accepts that a person can hold more than one nationality, and it has done so for decades.

The confusion usually comes from the other direction. Americans remember the renunciation language in the US naturalization oath and assume every country demands the same thing in reverse. Portugal does not: there is no oath of allegiance, no renunciation clause, and no moment in the file where you are asked to choose.

In this article:

• 1. Do I have to give up my US passport?
• 1. What Portuguese law says about holding two nationalities
• 1. What United States law says about acquiring another citizenship
• 1. What actually changes once you are Portuguese
• 1. Attribution or acquisition: why the difference follows your children
• 1. The real obstacle is not the passport
• 1. Frequently asked questions
• 1. Conclusion

Do I have to give up my US passport?

You keep it. You will hold two valid passports, and holding both is entirely normal for the millions of people worldwide who have more than one nationality.

There is no step in the Portuguese citizenship process — not in a descent file, not in a marriage file, not in a naturalization file — where you are asked to prove that you have renounced anything. The declaration you sign is a statement that you wish to be Portuguese, supported by documents. It is not a statement about what you wish to stop being.

What Portuguese law says about holding two nationalities

Portuguese nationality law addresses plural nationality directly and accepts it. If a person is Portuguese and also holds another nationality, Portuguese authorities simply treat them as Portuguese when they are dealing with Portugal, without asking about the rest (Lei 37/81, the Nationality Act).

The practical consequence is easy to state. Inside Portugal — and, more broadly, in your dealings with the Portuguese State anywhere — you are Portuguese. Your American nationality is not held against you, is not something you have to declare in order to be tolerated, and does not weaken the status you have acquired or that has been attributed to you.

Portugal did not arrive at this position by accident. It is a country whose people emigrated in very large numbers to the United States, Canada, Brazil, Venezuela and elsewhere, and whose law was written with the descendants of those emigrants in mind. The whole architecture assumes a family whose life is somewhere else.

What United States law says about acquiring another citizenship

The American side is the part that worries people most, and here the position is also settled. Under United States law, a citizen who voluntarily acquires another nationality does not lose US citizenship unless they act with the intention of giving it up — the standard drawn from section 349 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and confirmed by the Supreme Court. Obtaining a foreign citizenship, by itself, is not treated as that intention.

The State Department's own practice reflects this: it presumes that Americans who naturalize elsewhere intend to keep their American citizenship. Nothing in a Portuguese file asks you to declare otherwise, and no Portuguese authority reports your file to Washington.

| A common worry | What actually happens | |---|---| | "I will have to renounce my US citizenship" | No renunciation is required or requested in the Portuguese process | | "I will have to hand in my US passport" | You keep it and use it normally | | "I have to swear an oath to Portugal" | There is no oath of allegiance in the Portuguese citizenship process | | "The US will find out and take action" | Acquiring another nationality is not, by itself, grounds for losing US citizenship | | "My children will have to choose at eighteen" | Portugal does not require a choice at any age | | "Two nationalities means two sets of civil records" | It means one civil life that both records must reflect consistently — this is the part that needs care |

What actually changes once you are Portuguese

The change is not in what you give up. It is in what you gain and in what the Portuguese State starts to expect from your record.

You become a citizen of a European Union member state, with the rights that come with that status for you and, through the family routes, for the people closest to you. You can hold a Portuguese identity card and passport. Your civil events — a marriage, a divorce, the birth of a child — become events the Portuguese registry expects to see reflected, in order, on your Portuguese record.

That last point is the one people underestimate. Citizenship is not only a document you receive; it is an entry into a system of records that is meant to stay coherent for the rest of your life and for the generation that follows you.

Attribution or acquisition: why the difference follows your children

Portuguese law distinguishes between being Portuguese from birth, which it calls attribution, and becoming Portuguese later, which it calls acquisition. Descent routes generally produce attribution, and the effect is retroactive: once registered, you are treated as having been Portuguese all along, including on the day your children were born.

That retroactivity is why the order in which a family files matters so much. A father who obtains citizenship by descent is Portuguese as of his own birth, so his children can normally be registered on the same basis, at any age. A spouse who becomes Portuguese through marriage acquires the status from the date it takes effect, which opens a different and narrower path for children.

Neither route requires anyone to give up anything American. But they are not interchangeable, and choosing the wrong sequence can turn a straightforward family file into three difficult ones.

The real obstacle is not the passport

In practice, almost nobody's Portuguese citizenship is blocked by their American nationality. What blocks files is the civil record.

The pattern we see constantly: a man of Portuguese descent, married for the second time, discovers that Portugal still records him as married to his first spouse, because his American divorce was never accepted here. A divorce decree issued by a court outside the European Union produces no effect in the Portuguese registry until a Portuguese court reviews and confirms it (article 978 of the Civil Procedure Code). Until that step is taken, his current marriage cannot be transcribed, and his wife's citizenship file has nothing to attach to.

At Fluxia Law this is the work: reading the record, establishing which foreign decisions have to be recognized and in what order, and carrying both the recognition and the administrative citizenship route through to the end — so that the file is complete when it is examined.

Frequently asked questions

Will the Portuguese consulate ask to see my US passport? It may ask for identification like any registry office would, and your US passport is perfectly acceptable for that. It is identification, not something to be surrendered.

Do my children have to pick one nationality when they turn eighteen? Not under Portuguese law. Portugal does not force a choice at adulthood, and children registered as Portuguese remain Portuguese.

Does having two nationalities complicate travel? Generally not. It is common practice to enter and leave each country on that country's passport, and Portuguese nationality gives you the standing of an EU citizen inside the Union.

I already have Portuguese citizenship. Can my wife get it too? That is a distinct route, based on the marriage rather than on descent, and it requires the marriage to be on the Portuguese record. If an earlier divorce was never recognized here, that is usually what has to be resolved first.

Conclusion

The fear that stops many American families is the wrong fear. Nobody will ask you to choose between your two countries, and the Portuguese process contains no renunciation of any kind.

What deserves attention instead is the state of your Portuguese record — the marriages, the divorces, the births that may or may not have been brought into the system in the right order. That is where citizenship files actually succeed or stall, and it is the part worth looking at before anything is filed.

Read also

• Becoming a Citizen of Portugal: Every Route Compared in One Table
• One Family, Three Cases: Citizenship for Him, for His Wife, for the Children
• Portuguese Citizenship Requirements in 2026: The Full Checklist, Route by Route