Portugal is rewriting two civil-registry careers, with back pay to July 2025
A draft decree-law reshaping the conservador and registry-officer careers has cleared public consultation and now goes to the Council of Ministers. The largest monthly rise is 288.49 euros, and it lands in the middle of the scale rather than at the top.
If you work behind the counter at a Portuguese conservatória, your pay scale is about to be redrawn. The draft decree-law revising the careers of conservador de registos and oficial de registos appeared on 3 August in separata 24/2026 of the Boletim do Trabalho e Emprego, has finished its twenty days of public consultation, and is now waiting on the Council of Ministers.
The headline figure is 288.49 euros a month. That is the biggest rise produced by repositioning in the conservador career, and it does not go to the people at the top. It goes to the middle. Someone currently on level 54, at 3,596.57 euros, moves to level 59, at 3,885.06 euros. Someone four rungs higher, on level 58, moves a single step and gains 57.70 euros — roughly twenty times less, in the same career, under the same decree.
Why the middle does best
The rule itself sounds even-handed. Anyone in these careers on 30 June 2025 is repositioned, as a general rule, one level above the one they held. Where that produces a rise of less than 28 euros, they move up one further position, worth about 56 euros more.
The uneven result comes from the shape of the new table. The conservador scale shrinks from ten positions to nine and loses three supplementary ones, so the distance between rungs is no longer consistent. In the middle of the scale the next position sits well above; at either end it sits right alongside. That is why someone on level 50 gains 230.80 euros while someone on level 58 gains 57.70.
Registry officers follow the same logic with different numbers. Their career becomes single-category, with eleven positions replacing the two parallel structures and the supplementary levels in force today. The largest ordinary repositioning gain there is 230.79 euros, for staff moving from level 49 to level 53.
The back pay will not be the same for everyone
The new positions take effect from 1 July 2025 — fourteen months of adjustment by the time anything is published.
How much each person receives depends on where they started and where they land. And there is a condition that tends to drop out of summaries: the whole process is contingent on the 2023/2024 performance-appraisal cycle being closed first. Until that is done, nobody is repositioned.
Two corrections are aimed at staff the old structure left behind. Conservadores and officers with twenty or more years of actual service at the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado on 30 June 2025, sitting in the lowest positions, have 56 euros added to their base pay purely for the repositioning calculation. Officers who came up through the old escriturário career and qualified for promotion to escriturário superior but were never promoted for budget reasons have 140 euros added on the same basis.
What changes beyond the money
One change sits outside the pay table entirely. Registry officers who handle or are responsible for cash at a conservatória gain entitlement to abono para falhas, a supplement covering shortfalls in what they collect. The amount will be set later by portaria.
Entry requirements change too. New registry officers will need a degree in law, solicitadoria or public administration, and must stay in post for at least two years after the probationary period.
It is worth reading this next to what the same institute has been asked to absorb. We reported this month on the staffing behind Portugal’s nationality backlog, where the size of the team itself was the story — see our piece on the 47 conservadores assigned to nationality cases. A more attractive pay scale is the other half of the same attempt: without people willing to join and stay, the deadlines do not hold, whether on nationality or on the inherited-property regime the Government has 180 days to approve.
None of it is law yet. A draft in consultation is a proposal, and the entry-into-force date, the 2027 figures and the value of the cash supplement are only settled when the decree-law reaches the Diário da República.
Chart: Tugadaily, from the draft decree-law published in the Boletim do Trabalho e Emprego
