Four zones lost Portugal's €750 teacher bonus. All four are in the Alentejo or the Lezíria
We opened both government orders and compared the annexes. Two zones joined the shortage map for 2026/27 and four dropped off it — and the four that dropped off cover fourteen southern municipalities.
The €750 a month Portugal pays teachers who put off retirement applies this school year in eight pedagogical zones. Last year it applied in ten. That subtraction was reported as a subtraction — two fewer — and most coverage stopped there.
Two is the net figure. The gross figure is four out and two in, and the four that left share a map: the Lezíria do Tejo, the Alentejo Litoral, the Baixo Alentejo. The Alentejo now has no zone on the shortage list at all.
Where the number comes from
There is no shortcut here. You have to open both orders and lay the annexes side by side, because neither document says what changed.
The 2025/26 list sits in Despacho n.º 11200-A/2025, dated 23 September, and names ten zones: 40, 45, 46, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61 and 62. This year’s list is Despacho n.º 10024/2026, published on 11 August, in force from 1 September, and it expressly repeals the older one. Its annex names eight: 42, 45, 46, 59, 60, 61, 62 and 63.
Compare them and four zones are gone. Zone 40 (Alenquer, Azambuja, Cartaxo, Rio Maior and Santarém), zone 54 (Grândola, Santiago do Cacém and Sines), zone 57 (Aljustrel, Odemira and Ourique) and zone 58 (Almodôvar, Castro Verde and Mértola). Fourteen municipalities, not one of them north of the Tagus.
Two arrived. Zone 42 — Mafra, Torres Vedras, Arruda dos Vinhos and Sobral de Monte Agraço — and zone 63 in the eastern Algarve: Tavira, Vila Real de Santo António, Castro Marim and Alcoutim. The other six stayed put.
The test was rewritten, and the test explains everything
This year’s order does not pick zones one by one. It picks regions, and the zones follow.
It defines structural teacher shortage as the number of school clusters that finished 2025/26 with at least one full timetable unfilled, and it counts that by NUTS III statistical region. The three regions with the highest count — Greater Lisbon, the Setúbal Peninsula and the Algarve — qualify, and any pedagogical zone covered by one of them qualifies with it.
Follow that through. A school in the Baixo Alentejo can start September with unfilled timetables and still get nothing, because its region did not finish in the national top three. What used to be a measure aimed at schools short of teachers is now a measure aimed at the three regions with the most such schools. Those are not the same thing.
Mafra is worth a closer look
Zone 42 shows the mechanism at its cleanest. Of its four municipalities only one, Mafra, is in Greater Lisbon. Torres Vedras, Arruda dos Vinhos and Sobral de Monte Agraço are Oeste. Because the rule qualifies a whole zone once the region touches it, all four are in.
A hundred kilometres away, Santarém and Rio Maior are out. Not because their schools improved, but because the Lezíria do Tejo is not one of the three regions on the list.
In April the government said something different
Keep one date in mind. On 2 April, announcing the teacher recruitment round for 2026/27, the government highlighted 3,152 posts in shortage areas and named three territories with the greatest recruitment difficulty: Greater Lisbon, the Algarve and the Alentejo. Four months later the order that decides who actually gets the money took the Alentejo off the map. Same government, same school year.
What else hangs on this list
The money, first. Decreto-Lei n.º 175/2026, published on 3 September and in force since the 1st, sets the €750 a month for teachers who defer retirement and restricts it to the 235 schools and clusters inside the eight zones — and even there only where no other teacher can cover the timetable. The same decree lets schools hire retired teachers and post-Bologna graduates.
The list does more than that, though. The enhanced relocation allowance for teachers, created in 2024, is indexed to the same shortage zones. A teacher posted to Mértola or Sines this year loses both at once.
Two things are still not in any public document: how many of last year’s deferred retirements were in the four zones that just dropped off, and what happens to them now. We will come back to it when there is an answer — as we did with August’s 20,404 placements and with what the teachers’ union objects to in the new recruitment rules.
Image: Threeohsix / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
