An Observador Cetelem study released 17 July shows 87% of Portuguese planning to buy or move house factor climate-risk exposure into the decision. Storms top the fears (48%), followed by heatwaves (45%) — and only 62% think their home could cope.

By Duarte Figueiredo

Image: European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery / Wikimedia Commons (Attribution)

An energy certificate for a home in Portugal typically costs 120-250 euros plus VAT, is valid for 10 years and is mandatory from the moment you advertise a sale or rental. ADENE fees, steps and timings for 2026.

Short answer first: an energy certificate for a home in Portugal costs, in practice, between 120 and 250 euros plus VAT, is valid for 10 years, and is mandatory from the moment you advertise the property for sale or rent — not just at the deed. Selling without one risks a fine. The document grades a property's energy performance from A+ (excellent) down to F (very poor), and can only be issued by a qualified assessor registered with the SCE, the national…

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Selling a home in Portugal means an agency commission (typically 3-6% plus VAT), an energy certificate, a possible early-repayment fee on your mortgage and income tax on half the capital gain. Full 2026 guide.

Straight answer: selling a home in Portugal comes with three blocks of costs — the estate agency commission (typically 3-6% plus VAT), the mandatory paperwork (energy certificate first), and, the following year, income tax on the capital gain, where as a rule only half the gain is taxed. Forgetting the third block is the expensive mistake. There is no legal price list: the commission is negotiated in the brokerage contract and usually runs 3% to 6% of the…

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A running tracker of Portugal's housing market — the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability. Updated with each new data release.

We gather here, in one place, how Portugal's housing market is moving. Instead of one article per data point, we update this page with the essentials: the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability for buyers and renters. Official data is at INE. S&P now forecasts Portugal will post Europe's biggest house-price rise in 2026 — the agency updated its projections this week, in a country that had already closed Q1 with 16.5% annual growth, the…

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Decree-Law 108/2026 rewrites Portugal's planning rules from 3 August: tacit approval when councils miss deadlines, prior notification for more works, 20-to-45-day decision windows and a new urban-planning title. What changes if you build, renovate or buy.

From 3 August, if a Portuguese council doesn't answer your building application within the legal deadline, the application counts as approved. That's the headline change in the new planning regime brought in by Decree-Law 108/2026, which rewrites the urban development framework (RJUE) to attack one of the biggest bottlenecks in Portuguese housing: the time projects spend sitting in a queue waiting for an answer. Three main things. First, tacit approval…

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The Simplified Affordable Rent Regime starts on 1 September 2026: rent at up to 80% of the municipal median, a 3-year contract, and full exemption from income tax on the rent.

From 1 September 2026, a landlord who rents a home at up to 80% of their municipality's median rent, on a contract of at least three years, pays no income tax at all on that rent. Not a reduced rate — a full exemption. This is the Simplified Affordable Rent Regime, known in Portugal as the RSAA, and it is the sharpest tool in this year's housing tax package. Worth saying what it replaces. The RSAA takes over from the old Rental Support Programme, and the…

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The IMF and the Bank of Portugal want the state guarantee that funds 100% of a first home for under-35s scrapped. The government says no, and blames the housing shortage for rising prices.

Portugal's government will not touch the public guarantee that lets under-35s buy a first home with no deposit — and it said so after the International Monetary Fund argued the scheme should end and the Bank of Portugal warned it is inflating risk on bank balance sheets. Two of the loudest warnings a government can get about housing, and the answer was no. The state stands as guarantor. Instead of the buyer scraping together the 10% or 20% deposit a bank…

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Just one in three homes for sale in Portugal costs under €300,000, and stock in that band fell 31% in a year. A snapshot of the 2026 market.

Anyone hunting for a home under €300,000 is fighting over a third of the market. That is the picture in 2026: only one in three homes on sale in Portugal falls below that mark, and stock in that band has shrunk 31% in a single year. The problem is not just the price of each home, it is that the more affordable ones are simply vanishing from the listings. Roughly one in three of the homes currently for sale. The biggest slice of the market, 44%, sits…

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Lisbon's city council approved the public auction of ten plots 'forgotten for decades'. PS and Bloco say they could have housed around 500 families.

Lisbon's city council is putting ten municipal plots up for public auction with a combined minimum price of €59.2 million. The proposal passed this week with the votes of the PSD/CDS-PP/IL majority and Chega — and with the entire left opposed, doing the maths on what could have been built there instead: affordable housing for around 500 families, according to the Socialists. Ten parcels spread across Marvila, Beato, Penha de França, Lumiar, Belém,…

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The gross yield on buying a home to rent out in Portugal fell to 6.2% in Q2 2026. Where returns are highest and why the risk has dropped too.

Buying a home to rent out in Portugal returned a gross 6.2% in the second quarter of 2026 — down from 6.9% a year ago and well below the 7.2% of 2024. The explanation is simple: purchase prices keep climbing much faster than rents, so every euro invested in bricks buys less rental income than it used to. The national average sits at 6.2% gross per year, but the map is anything but uniform. Lisbon is, paradoxically, the worst buy-to-let deal in the…

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The ROAD to Housing Act became law without a presidential signature: 40+ provisions, including a ban on big corporate landlords buying more houses.

The most ambitious American housing law in decades took effect in an unusual way: without the president's signature. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law at midnight on July 11 because Donald Trump let the ten-day deadline pass without signing or vetoing it — in protest, he said, at the Senate's failure to pass his voter ID bill. The bipartisan law bundles more than 40 provisions, from manufactured-home construction to local financing. The…

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Portugal's rental reform brings forward the end of rent limits on new leases, cuts the eviction trigger to two months of arrears and sets transition rules for pre-1990 rents. Here is what changes.

Rent control on new leases in Portugal is set to end three years ahead of schedule: that is the headline change in the rental reform approved by the Council of Ministers on 9 July, which touches new contracts, pre-1990 rents and evictions all at once. In short: on new leases, landlord and tenant will freely agree the rent. The brake limiting initial rents on new contracts already had an expiry date; the government has now brought it forward by three…

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Portugal's dstgroup will build 339 tourist units in Vila Nova de Santo André, a 52-million-euro project using industrialised construction, ready from 2028.

The Alentejo coast is about to gain 339 holiday homes in one go — and none of them will be built the old-fashioned way. The development, in Vila Nova de Santo André in the municipality of Santiago do Cacém, was awarded to dstgroup by an international investor and will be delivered through industrialised construction via Zethaus, the Braga group's brand dedicated to the model. Around 52 million euros, 339 units and capacity for roughly 1,200 guests, with…

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Casais Group and Spanish builder ACR have created CREE Iberia to speed up industrialised, sustainable construction across Portugal and Spain.

Build faster, waste less, emit less: that is the promise behind CREE Iberia, the company Braga-based Casais Group has just created in equal partnership with Spanish builder ACR. The new venture, owned 50-50, holds the exclusive licence for the CREE Buildings hybrid construction system across the Iberian Peninsula. Bring industrialised construction — modules and components manufactured off-site, then assembled on the ground — to segments where time is…

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Over half of Portuguese mortgage lending goes through credit intermediaries, and 57.2% of brokered operations involve homes of 250,000-500,000 euros. Most cases take 31 to 60 days.

Homebuyers in Portugal now arrange more mortgages through credit intermediaries than directly at the bank counter — and the picture of what those brokers are financing says a lot about the market. According to an industry study released this week, 57.2% of brokered operations involve properties between 250,001 and 500,000 euros. The 150,000-euro house is increasingly a memory. In most cases, between one and two months: 55.3% of complete processes are…

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