Portugal income tax: four different tables in three years

Search for Portugal's income tax rates and you will be told the bottom rate is 12.5%. Or 13%. Or 13.25%. PwC says one, the expat tax firms say another, and none of them is wrong.

Article 68 of the Portuguese income tax code was rewritten four times in three years. Each of those numbers is the first bracket of a different version.

The four tables

The August 2024 rewrite applied to the whole of 2024, retroactively. So even “the 2024 rate” has two answers depending on when the page was written.

The brackets and the rates move for different reasons

This is the part that explains the confusion, and almost nobody separates the two.

The bracket limits now move by formula. Article 68-B, added to the code by Lei 34/2024 of 7 August, indexes them automatically every year:

(1 + t.v. DPIB) × (1 + t.v. PIB/t)

DPIB is the GDP deflator, PIB/t is GDP per worker, both from the national statistics institute. The resulting coefficient is published by ministerial order by 20 September each year. For 2026 it was 1.0351.

The rates move by political decision, separately and unpredictably. For 2026 the cut was 0.3 percentage points — but only in brackets two through five. The first bracket and the top four did not move at all.

The coefficient checks out, and the rounding matters

Most reporting rounds the 2026 indexation to “3.5%”. Applied to the 2025 bracket limits, 3.5% reproduces none of the eight thresholds. 1.0351 reproduces all eight, to the euro:

There is a second-order detail worth knowing if you try to reproduce next year's table yourself. The published component rates are a deflator of 3.9953% and GDP per worker of −0.4627%, which give 1.03514114. Applied raw, that value misses six of the eight limits, by up to three euros. The coefficient is rounded to four decimals before it is applied, and the rounding is load-bearing.

The law currently disagrees with itself

Article 68 has two paragraphs. The first carries the table. The second explains how to use it, and it opens by naming the first bracket:

O quantitativo do rendimento coletável, quando superior a 8059 €, é dividido em duas partes…

The table above it says the first bracket ends at €8,342. The tax authority's own page prints the reason next to each paragraph: the table is Redação da Lei n.º 73-A/2025, the sentence is Redação da Lei n.º 45-A/2024. The automatic indexation updated the table and left the prose a year behind.

In the 2025 version the two agreed — both said €8,059. In the 2024 versions they agreed too, at €7,703. The gap opened when the brackets started moving on their own.

For taxable income between €8,059 and €8,342 the two paragraphs read differently. In practice the table governs, and the amount at stake is small. It is worth knowing anyway, because it tells you something about the source: a figure you find in the prose of this article is not necessarily current, while the table is.

What we checked and got wrong

The August 2024 rewrite cut rates but also pulled the upper bracket boundaries down — the seventh bracket from €51,997 to €43,000, the top one from €81,199 to €80,000. That looked like a cut for the low paid, financed by the high paid.

It is not. Computed across incomes from €15,000 to €90,000, the August version is cheaper at every one of them. But the saving is not flat: it peaks around €40,000 at about €409 a year and falls to roughly €237 at €90,000. The lowered boundaries take back part of the rate cut higher up, without ever turning it negative.

What this page does not cover

These are the general rates on taxable income, and taxable income is not your salary. Before the table applies, employment income is reduced by the specific deduction, and social security of 11% is withheld separately and does not pass through this scale at all. Above €80,000 a solidarity surcharge of 2.5% is added, rising to 5% above €250,000 — a separate article of the code, not part of the table here.

The Azores and Madeira reduce these rates for their own tax residents under the regional finance law, and have their own withholding tables — if you live there, the table above is not yours. Non-residents are taxed differently again, usually at a flat rate on Portuguese-source income.

For what the current scale means in money on a specific salary, including the deduction and the contribution, see our Portugal salary page. If you qualify for the incoming-resident regime, the flat rate replaces this scale entirely — the IFICI page works out where the crossover point sits.

Sources

Every table on this page was read on the tax authority's own site: the current article 68, and its earlier versions for 2025, late 2024 and early 2024. The indexation rule is article 68-B.

The 2026 coefficient was set by Portaria 322/2025/1 of 3 October 2025. We could not open that order at the official gazette, whose site returns an empty shell to anything but a browser session, so the two component rates above are reported rather than read by us. The coefficient itself we did not take on trust: it is confirmed by the tax authority's own tables, which it reproduces exactly and which nothing else does.