Portugal's €20 rail pass is being extended to Lisbon and Porto commuter trains
The green rail pass costs €20 a month and has so far excluded the suburban lines around both metropolitan areas. The prime minister says that changes in September.
For almost two years Portugal has had a rail pass that carries you from Bragança to Faro for €20 a month, and for almost two years it has had a hole in the middle of it. The suburban lines around Lisbon and Porto — where a very large share of the country actually commutes — were left out. Prime minister Luís Montenegro said on Friday, at his party’s summer rally in the Algarve, that the green rail pass will be extended to urban trains in both metropolitan areas, “probably as soon as September”.
His phrasing was blunt enough: anyone who wants to travel by train inside the Lisbon and Porto metropolitan areas will be able to do it on the same €20 a month.
What the pass covers today
The green rail pass launched in October 2024. It covers the whole regional and inter-regional network, plus Intercidades services if you reserve in advance, plus urban stretches that were not already folded into an intermodal ticket. Two things sat outside it: the Alfa Pendular, and the commuter lines of Greater Lisbon and Greater Porto — Sintra, Azambuja, Cascais, Sado, Braga, Aveiro, Guimarães, Marco. The current terms are set out on CP’s own page for the pass.
So a passenger from Coimbra could cross the country on the pass and then not be allowed onto the Sintra line at the other end. If you live outside the big centres and travel into them, you were doing the sums twice.
What is still missing
All of the small print. There is no published list of which lines are included, no explanation of how this sits alongside the Navegante and Andante intermodal passes, and no legal instrument fixing a date. “Probably as soon as September” is an intention announced at a political rally, not a deadline.
Worth waiting for the official publication before you cancel anything. CP has sold more than a million green passes since launch, and its own channels are where the final rules will land first.
The announcement was one of several made in the Algarve that night, alongside a promise of another income tax cut and another pensioner bonus. On the rolling stock CP does not have, we set out the problem earlier on the Lisbon–Évora and regional services — and that shortage, rather than the price, is what decides whether an extension like this is felt on the platform.
Image: Nuno Morão / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
