Buying property in Portugal

Portugal is the market we know best, and the one where the gap between the advertised market and the real one is widest.

The headline figures say the country is climbing hard. The median price of a home reached €2,337 per square metre in the first quarter of 2026, up 19.8% on the year and a record.

What the headline misses is where the buyers are standing. About 95% of the homes sold in 2025 went to buyers resident in Portugal — the largest share since the series began in 2019 — while purchases by non-residents fell for a third consecutive year, down 9.6% among EU residents and 17.1% among those from outside it.

That is not the same as saying foreign buyers have gone away. Foreign nationals bought a little over a quarter of Portuguese homes in 2025, and that number went up, not down. The distinction is residence, not nationality, and it is the whole point: the people buying are the people who are already here, with a lawyer they have used before and an agent who telephones them first.

Which is precisely the difficulty for a buyer who is not here. A market driven by resident demand is one where the best stock moves through local networks, at local speed, and frequently before anybody writes a listing. Somebody working from portals in another country is not looking at the same market. Closing that gap is the whole of what we do.

What it costs to buy

Budget somewhere between 7% and 10% on top of the purchase price, and expect the figure to sit at the upper end as the price rises. It is made up of:

• IMT, the transfer tax, on a sliding scale. A second home at €500,000 attracts €27,300 — about 5.5% — while above €1,150,853 a flat 7.5% applies to the whole value rather than to the slice above the threshold.
• Stamp duty at 0.8%, charged on the higher of the price or the rateable value.
• Notary and land registry, from about €400 for a Casa Pronta completion without a mortgage to around €1,000 for a notarial deed with the certificates that go with it.
• Legal fees, typically 1–2% depending on how complicated the title turns out to be.

Estate agency commission is paid by whoever signed the agency contract, which in practice is almost always the seller — but it is a matter of who signed, not a rule, and it is worth confirming rather than assuming.

Then, annually, there is IMI at between 0.3% and 0.45% of the rateable value for urban property, set council by council. Individuals holding more than €600,000 of Portuguese residential property pay AIMI on the excess as well: 0.7% up to €1 million, 1% between €1 million and €2 million, and 1.5% above that. AIMI does not apply to property classified for commerce, industry or services, which is worth knowing before a hotel is bought in a personal name.

How long it takes

First a NIF, the Portuguese tax number. Nothing can be bought without one and nothing else can start until it exists.

From agreed price to the contrato-promessa de compra e venda — the promissory contract, universally the CPCV — is usually two to four weeks. A deposit of 10% is normal, though 20% or 30% is not unusual on a property in demand. The CPCV is not a soft commitment: a buyer who walks away forfeits the deposit, and a seller who walks away owes double it.

From CPCV to the escritura, the deed, is typically another one to two weeks once the searches are clear. A cash purchase runs four to six weeks end to end; a mortgage adds four to eight.

What has changed, and what has not

Two things are worth being clear about, because both are widely misremembered.

Buying property no longer qualifies for the Golden Visa. The residence-by-investment route still exists — through funds, research, cultural heritage, job creation or investment in a Portuguese company — but real estate was removed from it and has not returned. Separately, the nationality law changed on 20 May 2026: naturalisation now requires seven years of legal residence for nationals of EU and Portuguese-speaking countries and ten years for everybody else. Applications already pending on that date keep the old five-year rule. We are property people, not immigration advisers, and anybody buying with residency in mind should take proper advice before they take ours.

Short-let licensing loosened, and the scary version of the rule is out of date. Decreto-Lei 76/2024 reversed the national freeze on new Alojamento Local registrations, made registrations permanent, and — this is the part still widely reported wrongly — repealed the rule that a registration lapsed when the property was sold. It does not. What councils may still do is declare containment areas and attach limits on transmissibility to registrations issued in them, and only for houses and apartments. So a registration usually passes on with the property, sometimes does not, and which it is depends on where the front door is and when the registration was issued. That is a question with an answer, obtainable from the council, and worth obtaining before the promissory contract rather than pricing in as a risk.

How we work here

We look for the property before it is advertised, agree the terms, and tell you plainly what is wrong with it. That last part is the one that matters. Every property has something — a boundary that was never registered, a licence that will not transfer, a neighbour with planning consent you would want to know about. We would rather lose the instruction than have you find out after the escritura.