Portugal's 7.5% IMT for Non-Resident Buyers, Explained

Last reviewed: 13 July 2026. Rule source: Decreto-Lei n.º 97/2026 (IMT change in force since 25 May 2026). The moderate-rent ceiling updates with the national minimum wage.

What changed, in plain words

IMT (Imposto Municipal sobre as Transmissões Onerosas de Imóveis) is Portugal's property transfer tax — usually the largest single cost on top of the price, and until this year it worked the same way for everyone: a progressive scale that depends on the property's price and whether it will be your main home.

Portugal's 2026 housing package changed that for one group. Decreto-Lei n.º 97/2026 amended the IMT code (article 17.º) so that when the buyer is a non-resident and the property is an urban building — or a fraction of one — destined exclusively for housing, the rate is always 7.5%, and none of the usual exemptions or reductions apply. The progressive scale, the main-home relief, the low bands — none of it operates while the buyer is non-resident and no exception applies.

Worth being upfront about what this is and is not. It is not a ban, a quota, or a restriction on foreign ownership — Portugal still places no nationality restriction on buying property, and everything in the complete guide to buying property in Portugal as a foreigner still holds. It is a tax rule about residence status at the moment of purchase, it applies to homes rather than shops, offices or plots, and it was written with its own exits: the exceptions and the refund path below are part of the decree itself, not a workaround.

When it took effect — and the September confusion

The decree was published on 20 May 2026, and the IMT change has been in force since 25 May 2026.

You may have seen summaries saying the 7.5% only starts on 1 September 2026. That reading conflates two parts of the same package. The decree's final article does set 1 September 2026 as the start date for other measures it contains — new credit and affordable-rental schemes and some revocations — but the IMT amendment is not on that list, and no special date is attached to it anywhere in the text. When a Portuguese law gives no express start date for a provision, the general rule applies: it enters into force on the fifth day after publication. Published 20 May; in force 25 May 2026.

The practical consequence is simple: there is no window to buy ahead of the rule — it is already live. The planning levers that remain are the ones the decree built in deliberately: the residency exceptions and the refund path. That is where your attention is best spent, and it is what the rest of this guide covers.

Weighing the purchase against a possible move? Portugal Compass maps your route in a couple of minutes — find your route →

Who the 7.5% rate touches — and who it doesn't

The rule turns on one question: are you tax resident in Portugal at the time of the purchase? Tax residence is defined by the Portuguese income-tax code (in outline: 183 days in the country in a 12-month period, or a home held as your habitual residence here) — it is a fact about where you live, not about your passport.

That single trigger produces some results people don't expect:

• A foreigner who already lives in Portugal as a tax resident is not touched. An American, German or Brazilian resident here buys on the ordinary progressive scale, main-home relief included.
• A Portuguese citizen living abroad is touched. Nationality is irrelevant; an emigrant buying a home back in Portugal while tax resident elsewhere meets the same 7.5% rate as any other non-resident — unless an exception applies.
• A non-resident buying a home to move into is touched only provisionally. Become tax resident within two years and the flat rate unwinds through the refund path below.
• Non-housing purchases sit outside the rule. It is written for urban property destined exclusively for housing; the exceptions themselves are defined for individual buyers under the income-tax residence test. If you are buying through a company or another structure, the treatment is a question for the tax specialist on your file, not a paragraph in any guide.

If you are unsure which side of the line you are on, that is not a small detail — it is the whole rate. It is also, usefully, a question with a precise legal answer, and one worth settling before the promissory contract rather than after. What the promissory contract commits you to explains why that document is the real point of no return.

The three exceptions — most of the story

Before you file the 7.5% under bad news, read the exceptions. They are not fine print; they are most of the story, and between them they cover the majority of people who read this site.

1. You are already tax resident in Portugal

If, at the date of purchase, you are considered tax resident in Portugal under the income-tax code, the rule never engages. You buy on the progressive scale like any resident, with whatever main-home treatment applies. This is the exception that keeps the rule away from the foreigners who have already made the move.

2. You become tax resident within two years

Buy now, move later — the decree allows it. If you become tax resident in Portugal within two years of the acquisition date, you fall within the exception. You will have paid the 7.5% at completion (the deed does not wait for your relocation), and once your residence status is established you claim back the difference between what you paid and what the progressive scale would have charged. For anyone who is buying ahead of a planned move — securing the home first, relocating in the following year or two — this exception is the rule working as designed. In our experience, that is exactly the order in which many buyers want to do things anyway.

3. You let the home at a moderate rent

The third exception is for buyers who are not moving at all. The flat rate does not stick if the home goes into residential letting at a moderate rent within six months of purchase, and stays let for at least 36 months — continuous or interpolated — during the first five years after you buy.

"Moderate" has a number: the monthly rent must not exceed the ceiling set by the decree, which for 2026 works out at €2,300 a month — the ceiling is defined as 2.5 times the national minimum monthly wage (€920 in 2026), so it moves when the minimum wage does, and the government can update it by portaria. In much of the country, ordinary market rents for the kind of home a foreign buyer purchases sit comfortably under that line; in prime Lisbon or Cascais, the ceiling is a real constraint to check against your rental strategy before you rely on this exception.

Notice what the three exceptions add up to: the resident buyer, the future resident, and the landlord who lets at an ordinary rent are all outside the flat rate's final reach. The buyer the 7.5% actually lands on, permanently, is the non-resident who keeps the home empty or as a personal holiday base and never moves. That is a deliberate policy choice about housing use — and knowing it is the design tells you which lever, if any, is yours.

The refund path: pay now, qualify later, claim the difference

The mechanics matter, because two of the three exceptions are usually satisfied after completion.

Here is the sequence as the decree sets it out:

1. At the deed, you pay IMT at 7.5% if you are non-resident and no exception is already established. The notary will not wait for your residence certificate or your first tenancy.
2. You then satisfy an exception — you become tax resident within the two-year window, or the home goes into moderate-rent letting within six months and the letting condition runs its course.
3. You apply, and the tax authority cancels the difference. The refund is not automatic: it is claimed a requerimento — by request to the Autoridade Tributária — and the rules attach a six-month window to the request, so diarise it rather than assume it. What comes back is the difference between the 7.5% you paid and what the progressive scale would have produced for your purchase.

Three practical notes from the buyer's side of the table. First, budget as if the 7.5% is real money, because at completion it is — the refund arrives later, after the condition is met and the request processed. Second, keep the paper trail: the residence registration or the registered tenancy agreement is what the claim stands on. Third, put the deadlines in your plan on day one — the two-year residency clock, the six-month letting clock and the six-month request window all start from dates fixed by the purchase, and a well-run file simply meets them. For a wider view of everything the completion budget carries, the full costs of buying breaks down each line.

What it does to your budget

For a non-resident buyer to whom no exception applies, the arithmetic on top of the price now starts at:

• IMT at 7.5% of the taxable value (in most purchases, the price);
• Stamp duty at 0.8% of the same base;
• Notary, registration and legal fees on top.

Call it roughly 8.3% before professional fees — a figure to hold in mind next to the older "6–8%" ranges you will still find quoted around the internet, which were written for the progressive scale. For a resident buyer, or a non-resident who lands an exception, the progressive scale still applies — under it, a main home is often taxed at zero or low rates up to a threshold, with second homes and higher price bands paying more. The distance between those two outcomes on the same property is exactly why your residence status and your timeline are now the first questions in any Portuguese property budget, ahead of the usual ones about condition and location. The good news for planners: both inputs are yours to control, which is more than can be said for most line items in a purchase. The list of the mistakes foreign buyers make has always started with under-budgeting the taxes; this rule simply raises the stakes of that particular habit.

If you're moving to Portugal anyway

If your purchase is part of a move — now or within a couple of years — the plain summary is that this rule mostly changes the order of your steps, not the destination.

The two-year exception means the house does not have to wait for the visa. Plenty of buyers prefer to secure the home first — while they can travel freely on visits — and complete the residency step afterwards; the decree accommodates exactly that, with the refund path unwinding the flat rate once residence is established. What changes is that the residency timeline is no longer only an immigration question: it is now also a tax event with money attached, so it belongs in the same plan as the purchase itself. The Portuguese residence-visa routes set out the main ways in; whichever fits, the sequence — NIF, bank account, contract, deed, residence — stays the sequence, and how to get your NIF is still step one of everything.

Two clarifications that save people wrong turns. Buying a home does not itself give you residency — it never did — and since October 2023 a property purchase no longer qualifies for the Golden Visa, whose real-estate route was removed; the home and the right to live here are separate decisions. And tax residence is a legal status with consequences well beyond IMT — it changes where your income is taxed. Timing it to save on the purchase without looking at the whole picture is how a good property decision becomes a poor tax one; that trade-off is for the tax specialist on your file, briefed on your actual income and countries, not for a general guide.

Where does MOL sit in this? We are not a tax practice and we do not file tax claims. In our buyer-advisory engagement we work only for you — and because we carry no properties of our own for sale, we search the whole open market for the home that fits, whichever agency holds it. What this rule adds is a sequencing job we already do daily: lining up the purchase calendar, the residency timeline and the paperwork so the right IMT treatment lands from the start, with the legal and tax specialists on your file handling the parts that are theirs. That holds for all three kinds of buyer we serve — the pure investor (for whom the letting exception is the one to study), the buy-now-move-later planner (the two-year clock), and the family relocating outright (residence first, then the deed, where the timing allows).

When you probably don't need us

If you are already tax resident in Portugal, this rule is simply not yours — you buy on the progressive scale, and if you also know your neighbourhoods, read Portuguese contracts comfortably and have a lawyer you trust for the conveyancing, you are well placed to run the purchase yourself. The same goes for the buyer with deep, current Portugal-specific knowledge — how the tax authority actually processes things, what a câmara's paperwork looks like, how a building's condition reads against its age in this climate. That buyer exists, and we say so with respect.

Where help earns its place is the situation this article keeps circling: a purchase run from abroad, under residence-status rules that moved this year, with clocks that start at the deed. Viewing in person on your behalf, reading the building and the street, keeping the NIF–bank–contract–deed sequence on time, and making sure the two-year, six-month and 36-month conditions are in the plan from day one — that is the property half of the move, done with local eyes. Advice at that level often pays for itself in the mistakes it avoids.

Frequently asked questions

What is the IMT rate for non-residents in Portugal in 2026? A flat 7.5%, with no exemption or reduction, when a non-resident buys an urban property destined exclusively for housing — introduced by Decreto-Lei n.º 97/2026, which amended article 17.º of the IMT code. Buyers who are tax resident in Portugal continue to pay the ordinary progressive scale.

When did the 7.5% IMT for non-residents start? It has been in force since 25 May 2026. The decree was published on 20 May 2026 and set no special date for the IMT change, so the general five-day rule applied. The 1 September 2026 date you may see elsewhere belongs to other measures in the same decree, not to the IMT amendment.

Does the 7.5% IMT apply to foreigners living in Portugal? No. The trigger is tax residence, not nationality. A foreign national who is tax resident in Portugal buys under the normal progressive IMT scale. Conversely, a Portuguese citizen who is tax resident abroad is covered by the flat rate like any other non-resident buyer.

What are the exceptions to the 7.5% non-resident IMT? Three: (1) you are already tax resident in Portugal at purchase; (2) you become tax resident within two years of the acquisition; (3) within six months you put the home into residential letting at a moderate rent and it stays let for at least 36 months, continuous or interpolated, during the first five years.

Can I get the 7.5% IMT refunded if I move to Portugal after buying? Yes. You pay 7.5% at the deed, and once you become tax resident within the two-year window you claim the difference back from the Autoridade Tributária. The refund is made on request rather than automatically, and the request carries a six-month window — so the claim should sit in your calendar from the day you complete.

What counts as a "moderate rent" for the letting exception? A monthly rent no higher than 2.5 times the national minimum monthly wage — €2,300 a month in 2026, based on the €920 minimum wage for the year. The ceiling updates alongside the minimum wage and can be revised by portaria, so check the current figure for the year you let.

Does buying property in Portugal still lead to residency or a Golden Visa? No — buying a home has never itself granted residency, and since October 2023 a property purchase no longer qualifies for the Golden Visa (the real-estate route was removed). Residence comes through the visa routes, which are a separate process from the purchase — though under the new IMT rule, becoming resident within two years does change the tax on the purchase itself.

Final thought

Portugal did not close its housing market to non-residents — it re-priced one specific pattern of use and left clearly signposted exits for everyone else. Read as a system, the rule is almost a questionnaire: are you here, are you coming, or will the home house someone at an ordinary rent? Answer yes to any of the three and the flat rate is provisional or never applies; answer no to all of them and 7.5% is the price of that choice. Either way, the winning move is the same one it has always been in a Portuguese purchase: settle your status and your sequence before the contract, not after the deed.

What this guide can't settle for you

That is the rule for everyone. What no article can work out is your line through it — whether your days in Portugal already make you tax resident, whether the two-year clock fits your family's real timeline, whether the letting route matches how you actually want to use the home, and what becoming tax resident here would mean for the rest of your income. That is exactly what a Portugal Path Session is for: a private hour with Mia & Rafael on your situation, and your Personal Path Plan in writing within 48 hours — the purchase, the residency timeline and the IMT treatment sequenced for your case, with the legal and tax specialists brought onto your file for the parts that are theirs. If the numbers say wait, or rent first, we will tell you — that is part of the session.

Book your Path Session → You leave with your bespoke Path Plan — in writing, within 48 hours.

Not ready? Tell us where you are → — and we will point you in the right direction.

Sources & Verification

No IMT progressive-scale thresholds, rental yields, or per-property figures are stated as hard numbers — they vary by property, use and year, so they stay qualitative here. The 7.5%, 0.8%, €2,300 rent ceiling, €920 minimum wage, and every clock (2 years / 6 months / 36 months / 5 years) are the statutory figures, each traced to the published decree text above. The effective-date reading (25 May 2026) follows the lei-formulário default because the decree attaches no express date to the IMT article; the tax specialist on your file can confirm it in one line for your purchase. Confirm the current position for your case with the Autoridade Tributária and qualified professionals before acting.