Company Registration: One Step Forward, Many Steps Sideways

Day 8

I got the name approved on March 25. Six days after submitting the application, two days after resubmitting it following a rejection.

The rejection, by the way, is not something the official guides spend much time on. I submitted through RNPC Online on March 19. Got back a rejection on March 21, the name was too similar to an existing company. The RNPC database flags similarity scores, and mine came back at 80%. I'd looked at the conflicting company when I was choosing the name: it was up in the north of Portugal, which felt geographically irrelevant. What I hadn't checked was their industry. It was the same as mine. That's the rule, similar name plus matching sector equals rejection. You can appeal a rejection, but the appeal process takes longer than just submitting a new name. I picked a different name, resubmitted March 24, got approval March 25.

One working week for step zero. Before any actual registration can begin.

Approved certificate in hand. Wednesday morning, March 26. Time to register the company.

---

Lagos Conservatória

Empresa na Hora is the in-person same-day registration service, walk into a participating Conservatória, pay €360, leave with an Lda. The concept has been running since 2006 and works for most people in standard circumstances. I wasn't expecting drama. An hour, maybe less.

Before going in person I'd tried the government's online appointment booking system at gov.pt. The first available slot was in July. I assumed it was an error, some display bug or a calendar that hadn't been updated. So I went in person instead.

It was not an error.

The Lagos Conservatória was open. There was one clerk at the desk. I went to get a ticket for Empresa na Hora and found the option crossed out in red on the service menu.

I asked the clerk about it. She said it wasn't available at the moment and that I should contact a lawyer to help register the company. No timeline, no further explanation.

At the time I didn't know what was behind that red cross. I found out later. The IRN, the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado, which runs civil and company registrations, has been in a staffing crisis since 2025. Conservatory closures, rolling industrial action, and a backlog of more than 500,000 pending nationality applications sharing the same offices and the same staff as company registration, property registrations, and everything else the IRN handles. The workers' union put it plainly as of April 2026: "The IRN no longer manages the crisis. It hides it at the cost of workers."

The Empresa na Hora service still exists on paper. Whether it exists in practice at a given office on a given day is a different question, and has been for over a year. The clerk wasn't unhelpful, she just couldn't offer what the sign said was available.

---

Espaço Cidadão, same day

Plan B: Empresa Online 2.0. The same legal outcome, no office visit required, one to two business days. I'd written about this system in the previous post, the EU-funded digital platform that pre-fills your profile from government records and lets you sign with a digital credential.

That digital credential is Chave Móvel Digital. And mine wasn't activated yet.

CMD activation requires an in-person identity verification visit. You cannot set it up online, the whole point is that someone checks your passport against the credential being issued. So: same day, I walked to the Espaço Cidadão.

This part worked. Short queue, efficient desk, twenty minutes. I tested the credential on the walk back. It authenticated cleanly on the government portal.

One step forward.

---

Empresa Online 2.0, that evening

Login with CMD: worked. The platform loaded. First two or three pages moved smoothly, company type (Lda), name certificate upload, share capital amount. I was starting to think this would be fine.

Then the platform pulled my full profile from the government database.

For Portuguese citizens, this is where the system earns its reputation. Address, phone number, personal details, all pre-filled from the citizen registry. You review and confirm, you don't type. The design is clean because the data is already there.

For me, Swedish, EU citizen, NIF registered, CMD active, everything in order, most fields came back blank. The Portuguese government database doesn't hold non-citizen EU resident data in the form the platform expects. There's no policy decision against EU citizens here; it's a data population gap. The fields exist. The records don't.

The platform won't let you continue past blank required fields. That's reasonable. What isn't: you also can't fill them in manually. The form is expecting all profile data to come from the validated eID source. If the source doesn't have it, the data doesn't exist. The system treats blank-from-database and blank-from-user as the same thing, and blocks on both.

I was authenticated, inside the system, two-thirds of the way through the form, and looking at fields I couldn't fill and couldn't skip. Not an error message redirecting me somewhere else. Just: the form cannot proceed.

I closed the browser.

---

What's left

I started calling lawyers and solicitadoras.

A solicitadora is a licensed Portuguese legal professional, fully authorized for company registration, narrower in scope than a full lawyer. They use the same Empresa Online 2.0 platform, but through a professional login that allows manual data entry where a citizen login cannot. This is the intended workaround for cases like mine: the platform accommodates it, just not directly.

The service they'd be providing: entering my information into the same form I'd been trying to complete.

First quote: €2,000. Second: €1,500. Third, after some back-and-forth: €1,000. None of them were doing something I was categorically unable to do, they had access to a form field I didn't. The variation in price across those three calls reflects the fact that when the self-service route closes, there's no standard market rate. You're negotiating in a gap, and the price depends on who happens to answer the phone.

I'm not describing this to criticise anyone who quoted €2,000. Legal practices have overhead. The point is that the price range tells you something about the system: when the official shortcut fails, the cost falls on whoever it fails for, and that cost is highly variable depending on who you know.

I eventually found a solicitadora in Lagos through a recommendation. Straightforward about what she'd be doing and what it would cost.

---

March 26 ended with a CMD credential I hadn't had that morning, a Conservatória I'd visited and left empty-handed, and a government platform I'd gotten most of the way through before it ran out of data to show me.

One step forward. Several sideways.

Post 3 covers what came next, specifically, what happens when you decide that a broken government digital service might be worth reporting to someone, and who that someone turns out to be.