Portugal's single social benefit gets its rulebook within days, and it costs 30 million euros more a year
The government is about to approve the decree that sets amounts and eligibility for the Prestacao Social Unica, the benefit folding 13 separate supports into one.
We are days away from knowing who gets paid and how much. The government is preparing to approve the decree that sets the amounts and eligibility conditions for the Prestacao Social Unica, and the labour ministry has already put a figure on it: an extra 30 million euros a year in social protection.
What is the Prestacao Social Unica?
It is an attempt to tidy the house. Instead of thirteen separate benefits inside Social Security’s solidarity subsystem, including the minimum income support known as RSI, there will be one benefit, one application and one set of rules. Anyone who has shuffled forms between counters understands the appeal instantly.
The contested part is the other half. The government keeps stressing what it calls a strong incentive-to-work component, with conditions tied to availability for work or for socially useful activity. Critics answer that attaching conditions to a benefit of last resort risks pushing out precisely the people who need it most. The text the President signed in July was only the legislative authorisation; this decree is where the numbers live.
When do the new rules take effect?
The timing is not really the government’s choice. To meet its Recovery and Resilience Plan commitments, the concrete rules have to be public by the end of August, which explains the hurry. Once approved in the Council of Ministers, the decree still needs presidential signature and can be sent for parliamentary review, giving the opposition one last window to change the wording.
For households living on these payments the practical question never changes: better off or worse off? That answer only arrives when the tables are published, and it is worth waiting for before drawing conclusions. The government’s own outline of the model sits on the official portal.
Image: GualdimG / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
