If you drive for Uber or Bolt in Portugal, today is when your rules change
Law 59/2026 scraps the surge-pricing cap, lets licensed taxis sign up to the apps and allows advertising on the cars. An operators' association says the statute gives two different start dates.
Eight years after Portugal first wrote rules for the ride-hailing trade, those rules have been rewritten. Law 59/2026 was published on 25 August and its article 7 brings it into force today, 1 September. It is the first substantial revision of Law 45/2018, which had promised a review after three years and never got one.
It starts with the name. The sector is no longer defined as transport in unmarked vehicles but as paid passenger transport in electronically dispatched vehicles, and that is not a drafting flourish. It is the door the taxi trade walks through. Firms holding a taxi licence may now operate as ride-hailing operators too, and taxi-licensed vehicles can be registered for the activity provided they are signed up with a licensed platform manager.
What does Portugal’s new ride-hailing law change for Uber and Bolt passengers?
The surge-pricing ceiling is gone. Until yesterday a fare could not be raised by more than 100 per cent, meaning double the normal price. The new law sets no ceiling at all, and asks instead that the factors behind the price be explained to the passenger clearly and objectively.
Vehicles must now carry a fixed identifying badge issued by the IMT, with anti-fraud features such as holograms, visible from outside and tied to the vehicle’s registration. Advertising on and inside the car, banned until now, is allowed and follows the rules that apply to taxis. The cars can also be older: the age limit rises from seven years to ten, and to twelve for electric vehicles.
In-car video arrives with brakes on it. The feature is optional, switched off by default, and can only be turned on for a specific trip after the passenger has been told before booking and the driver before accepting. Both have to agree. It captures images and images only, with sound recording expressly prohibited.
For drivers, the mandatory road-safety course now includes a check on functional command of Portuguese. Loan and usufruct arrangements for putting a car into service are banned, with narrow exceptions. And the IMT gets a data-sharing platform that cross-references operators, drivers, vehicles, insurance, roadworthiness tests and licences.
The start date that appears twice
This is where it gets awkward. The day after publication, the Portuguese association of unmarked-vehicle operators, APTAD, went public with what it called poor legislative drafting: article 7 of the body of the law says 1 September, while article 33 of the annex points to 1 November.
The second complaint matters more than the first. The transitional regimes are out of step. Article 4 of the main text gives the platforms 120 days, and in some cases up to a year, to adapt, while the adaptation window for operators, drivers and the IMT itself still sits in article 33’s neighbour, article 32 of the annex, which is an untouched 2018 provision. In practice the parties with the most resources got a timetable and everyone else kept the old one.
Taxi associations had asked the President to veto the bill on constitutional grounds. He signed it instead. So the law is on the books, the IMT has a platform to build, and the trade has two plausible start dates to choose between, which is an ungainly way to open a reform that had already dragged through a summer of parliamentary revision and was signed in July with the Portuguese-language test as its headline.
By Beatriz Mota
Image: Sharon Hahn Darlin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
