The state owes Portugal's polytechnics 38 million euros, and hiring has already stalled
Performance-review reforms and the unfreezing of teaching careers left the polytechnics carrying costs nobody reimbursed. Around 20 million euros of VAT on student residences is still working its way back too.
Portugal’s polytechnic institutions say they are carrying roughly 38 million euros of spending they never asked for and have not been reimbursed for. Two things produced it: the arrival of SIADAP, the public-administration performance-review system, and the unfreezing of teaching careers.
Asked how institutions are meant to absorb that, the head of the polytechnics’ coordinating council, Luís Loures, gave a one-word version of the answer. So far they have received nothing.
The bill behind the bill
The career unfreeze dates back to 2018 and still leaves back pay owing to lecturers who met the criteria years ago. Separately, about 20 million euros in VAT is outstanding, most of it on student residences built with recovery-plan money. The polytechnics paid that VAT across 2024 and 2025; the state only started returning it in July.
The consequence is concrete rather than budgetary. Some institutions have already scrapped competitions that would have moved guest lecturers onto permanent contracts, because they cannot guarantee the funding behind the posts. A guest lecturer is temporary by definition, and those competitions are the route to stability for people who have been teaching for years.
This is the same argument the council has been making publicly since the spring, when it called for funding on a par with the university system and said the polytechnic subsystem is treated as the poor relation of Portuguese higher education.
Everything else went their way this year
The timing has a certain sting to it. Thirteen institutions became “polytechnic universities” in August after a rewrite of the legal regime for higher-education institutions, and the council credits that renaming, together with changes to admissions rules, for much of the jump in places filled in this year’s first round of national applications.
More students, a better name, and a budget that did not follow. Term for the 2026/2027 academic year starts in a few weeks, and what the polytechnics are saying is that the gap between those two numbers has to come out of something.
Image: Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
