Portugal's NHR ended: four dates, and which one is yours

Search for the date Portugal's non-habitual resident regime ended and you will find 1 January 2024, 31 March 2024, 1 April 2025, and “the end of 2023” — from sources that all look credible.

None of them is wrong. They are four separate deadlines written into one article of one law, and each answers a different question. Which one applies to you depends on what you had, and when.

The repeal itself

The regime was repealed from 1 January 2024 by Law 82/2023 of 29 December, the State Budget for 2024. The tax authority puts it in one line: O regime fiscal dos Residentes Não Habituais foi revogado, a partir de 2024-01-01.

The “end of 2023” you will also see is the announcement, not the law. The two are eleven weeks apart, and only the second one has legal effect.

The four dates, and what each one decides

All of them come from Article 236 of the same law — the transitional provision.

So a page saying “applications closed on 31 March 2024” is right about people who became resident in 2023. A page saying “1 April 2025” is right about people who became resident in 2024. Both describe the same rule from different starting points.

If you were already registered, nothing changed

Article 236(3)(a) keeps the old rules running for anyone already registered as NHR when the law came into force — for the full ten consecutive years, counted from the year of registration. The repeal closed the door; it did not empty the room.

What the transitional route required

To come in after the repeal you had to become a tax resident by 31 December 2024 and hold one of six things, each with its own cut-off:

• a promise or contract of employment, or a secondment agreement, signed by 31 December 2023, for work to be performed in Portugal;
• a lease or other contract granting use or possession of Portuguese property, signed by 10 October 2023;
• a reservation or promissory contract to acquire a right in Portuguese property, signed by 10 October 2023;
• enrolment of your dependants at a school in Portugal, completed by 10 October 2023;
• a residence visa or residence permit valid until 31 December 2023;
• a visa or permit procedure started by 31 December 2023 — including a booked or requested appointment.

Members of the household of anyone in that list are covered too.

Registering late does not lose you the regime, and almost nobody says so

This is the part worth reading twice. Article 236(5) deals with registering after the deadline: the safeguarded taxation then takes effect from the year in which registration is made, for the remaining period, until the end of the ten years counted from the year the person became resident.

You lose the years you did not claim. You do not lose the regime.

The tax authority applied exactly this in a binding ruling dated 8 May 2026. A taxpayer had become resident in July 2021, met the conditions, and never registered. The answer: she can still apply, and the regime will run from the year of registration for whatever remains of her ten years.

That is a current reading from the body that decides these cases, not an interpretation of ours.

What replaced it

For anyone becoming resident from 2024 onward the successor is IFICI — a flat 20% on qualifying employment and self-employment income from a defined list of activities, for ten years. It is narrower than NHR: it is tied to what you do, not merely to having moved.

What this page does not tell you

Whether you personally met the residency conditions on 31 December 2023 is a question about your own days and ties in Portugal, and no page can answer it. The binding ruling above says as much in its own case: the authority answered the legal question and explicitly did not validate whether the taxpayer qualified.

Nor does this page cover what the regime taxed. The rates NHR applied to foreign pensions, dividends and employment income are a separate subject.

Where these dates come from

Article 236 of Law 82/2023 of 29 December, quoted verbatim in the Portuguese tax authority's own binding ruling (processo 26080, despacho of 8 May 2026), together with the authority's FAQ on non-habitual resident registration and Ofício-Circulado 90068 of 16 February 2024. Checked 9 September 2026.

The consolidated law on the Diário da República site renders in the browser and cannot be read by a plain fetch, which is why the wording here is taken from the authority that applies it rather than from a summary of it.