Portugal's university placement results land on 22 August and enrolment lasts four days
First-round results of Portugal's National Access Competition 2026 are published on 22 August. Placed students enrol online between 24 and 27 August through the DGES portal.
Apply / Learn moreThe date to put in your phone is 22 August: that is when first-round results of Portugal’s National Access Competition for higher education are published. Anyone placed then has four days, from 24 to 27 August, to enrol and register — and missing that window means losing the place.
When are the first-round results published?
On 22 August 2026, by the Directorate-General for Higher Education. You check them using your candidate number and access password, the same pair used to submit the application. Have both to hand before the day, because chasing a lost password at the last minute is the classic way to ruin a Saturday.
What is the deadline to enrol?
Between 24 and 27 August, four straight days. Enrolment and registration are done online, and that is what actually secures the place. Being placed is not enough: anyone who fails to register within the window is treated as having withdrawn, and the seat rolls into the next round.
What if you are not placed?
There is a second round of the national competition, plus institutional and special competitions run by individual universities and polytechnics on their own timetables. Those routes are genuinely worth working rather than writing the year off — plenty of places go unfilled in courses and regions nobody listed as a first choice.
One detail that matters financially: applications for higher-education grants open on 14 August and run to 2 October, so you can apply for the grant before you even know where you have been placed. If you apply for a grant and then do not enrol, the file simply stops. The reverse — getting placed and only then remembering the grant — usually costs weeks in payment delays. The full official calendar is on the DGES portal, and the earlier step is covered in our piece on applying to Portuguese universities.
Image: Daniel VILLAFRUELA. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
