The second Skills for Work round adds 50,000 free places to August's 50,000, across 80-plus certified Coursera courses. Applications close on 9 December, and there is an assessment test to pass.

You don't need a Santander account, and you don't need a degree. You do need to be over 18, live in one of the 12 countries where the programme runs (Portugal is one), and sit an assessment test on the platform. Santander and Coursera have opened a second round of 50,000 free places in their Skills for Work programme, adding to the 50,000 released back in August. That's 100,000 places in total, spread across more than 80 courses in artificial…

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ManpowerGroup's net employment outlook for Q4 rises to +32%, up 14 points on the previous quarter, with industry, construction and the Centro region leading hiring intentions.

Anyone job-hunting has reason to look at the year's final quarter with a bit more hope. ManpowerGroup puts Portugal's net employment outlook at +32% for October through December, up 14 points from the previous quarter and 19 above the same period last year. Of the employers surveyed, 44% plan to grow their teams, 44% plan to hold steady, and only 12% expect cuts. The survey, run across 42 countries and territories, finds manufacturing at the top of hiring…

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Decree-Law 161/2026 retires the registration-anniversary date. From 2027 the IUC is assessed once a year per taxpayer, covering every vehicle you own on 1 January, and the combined total decides whether you pay in one, two or three instalments.

For nearly two decades the IUC has run on one stubborn rule: you pay it in the month your car was first registered. Own three cars bought in three different seasons and you keep three dates in your head, and the penalty for forgetting never much cared whether the fault was yours or the calendar's. That is ending. Decree-Law 161/2026 was published on 4 August and takes effect from 1 January 2027, which is worth saying plainly up front: nothing at all…

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The lab runs on 26 and 27 October at Forum Braga, takes teams of one to five, and asks each company to bring one real problem. Applications close on 16 October and the whole thing is held in English.

Most digitalisation schemes ask a small company for a plan. This one asks for a problem. The SpaceX AI Lab for AI and Digital Transformation runs on 26 and 27 October at Forum Braga, and it is built like a hackathon. Each participating SME brings one concrete challenge from its own operation and spends two days building something against it, with mentoring and AI tooling on hand. A prototype, a workflow, a working solution. Not a slide deck. Applications…

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Applications shut at 15:00 Lisbon time on 30 September, while recommendation letters are due on 6 October. The entry bar is a 16.5 average with no rounding.

One detail about the Gulbenkian New Talents scholarships rescues a good share of the late applications every year, and hardly anyone says it out loud. There are two deadlines, not one. The applicant's own form closes at 15:00 Lisbon time on 30 September. Recommendation letters work differently: the Foundation requests them directly from whoever you name in the references field, and they are not due until 15:00 on 6 October. So if you are putting off…

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The pot is 18 million euros and applications close at 6pm on 12 October. The rate runs from 1.99% of sales for a polyvalent boat under 12 metres to 10.17% for a trawler of 24 metres or more.

It opened on 11 September and closes at 6pm on 12 October. In between, fishing, aquaculture and fish-processing companies operating on the Portuguese mainland can claim compensation for this year's jump in fuel prices. The government announced 18 million euros and said the amount depends on the fleet segment and the size of the vessel. It is worth spelling out what that means, because the gap between one boat and another is fivefold.

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Startup Portugal has two questionnaires open, one for startups and one for incubators, and the answers feed straight into the ENE 2030 diagnosis. The final strategy lands at the end of this year.

There is a practical difference between complaining about stock-option taxation at a conference and having that complaint land inside a document that later sets policy. Right now, and not for long, the second route is open. Startup Portugal is building the National Entrepreneurship Strategy 2030, the document that will set the public-policy agenda for entrepreneurship in Portugal across 2026-2030. The process is currently in its diagnosis phase, which…

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Portugal's tripartite agreement puts the minimum wage at 970 euros in 2027 and 1,020 in 2028. The CGTP wants 1,100 from 1 January 2027, and has called a national demonstration for 17 October.

Back in July, when we last wrote about this, the CGTP was asking for a 1,050-euro minimum wage in 2027. Its national council met on Friday and the number moved up: it is now 1,100 euros, from 1 January 2027. Fifty euros does not sound like much of a shift in a union demand. But 1,100 is not a round figure picked at random, and that is where it gets interesting. It is the number the government itself wrote into its programme as the target for 2029.

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The second PME Pitch awards are open to startups incorporated in Portugal within the last ten years, and to teams whose project exists only on paper. The final is at Taguspark on 28 October.

Three minutes is not long to explain a business to people who have never heard of it. That constraint is the whole point of the second edition of the PME Pitch awards, which take applications until 16 October. The winner gets €5,000, handed over as a symbolic cheque at the closing ceremony of the Fórum PME Magazine. The final runs on 28 October at Taguspark in Oeiras, and each finalist walks on stage with those three minutes and nothing else. Slides,…

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The EUIPO has closed its two most popular vouchers — IP Scan, and trade marks and designs — because the money ran out. Patents and plant varieties still take applications until 4 December, or until they go the same way.

Small firms put off registering a trade mark for the same reason every time: it looks like something you do once you already have money. The European scheme built to undo that calculation has just closed that particular door. The EU SME Fund, the grant scheme the EUIPO runs for small and medium businesses, has stopped taking applications for IP Scan and for trade marks and designs — its two most popular vouchers — because the money set aside for each of…

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Portugal 2030's MPR-2026-6 call closes at 5pm on 30 September. Of the total, €71m is ring-fenced for low-density areas and €111.5m for the rest of the mainland. Applications go through the Balcão dos Fundos.

There is a Portugal 2030 call closing on 30 September, and the pot is one of the year's biggest for companies: €182.5 million in non-repayable funding for innovative productive investment by micro, small and medium-sized firms. It is called notice MPR-2026-6, it sits inside the SICE incentive system, and it is a joint call from COMPETE 2030 and the mainland regional programmes. It opened on 15 June and applications close at 5pm on 30 September.

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The European Commission approved a €30 million Portuguese scheme for farming, fishing and aquaculture on Wednesday. IFAP has to pay every cent of it by 31 December.

The European Commission signed off on Wednesday on a €30 million Portuguese state aid scheme for farming, fishing and aquaculture businesses. It was the last formal step, taken under the temporary framework created in response to the Middle East crisis and the fuel and fertiliser prices it pushed up. For anyone actually working the land, the approval is not the interesting part. The rates are. The farming side has been mapped out since June, in Council of…

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The second-round total everyone quoted is not the final one. DGES publishes today the first-round seats nobody enrolled in, and applications stay open until 20 September.

Everyone printed the same figure: 6,639 places going into the second round. It is accurate and it is incomplete. The DGES note itself says the September round also takes in the seats that were awarded in August but never enrolled against, and that those numbers are only published today, 1 September, on the agency's website. Which means anyone weighing up whether to apply spent last week looking at a total that is about to grow. Once today's list is out,…

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Up to 6% of annual base salary escapes both income tax and social security in 2026. The ceiling counts fourteen months rather than twelve, and tax is withheld anyway when the bonus lands.

A performance bonus in Portugal can reach you without a cent of income tax on it. Whether it does is largely out of your hands. The rule works like this: up to 6% of annual base salary, productivity and performance bonuses, profit shares and balance-sheet gratuities are exempt from IRS and sit outside the social security contribution base, provided they are paid voluntarily and without regular character. Anything above the 6% line is taxed the way it…

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Government transparency data shows 20.5 of 23 billion euros advertised across 1,467 calls. Madeira sits at 59.57% of its programmed envelope and the Azores at 68.95%, against 101.83% in Lisbon.

Every time another Portugal 2030 call opens, one question goes unasked: how much of the total has actually been advertised, and how much is still sitting there. The government's own transparency portal answers it. Of the 23 billion euros programmed under Portugal 2030, 20.5 billion has been put out to tender across 1,467 published calls. That leaves roughly 2.5 billion that has not yet reached an application form. The figures come from AD&C and are…

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A decree approved on 20 August extends the exceptional overtime regime to the entire Kristin calamity period, 28 January to 28 June, and puts central government, municipal and state-owned company staff under one set of rules.

If you spent January nights clearing drains, reopening roads or answering phones in a council office while the water rose, you worked well past your hours. What stayed unresolved for months was how those hours would be paid — and whether the answer changed depending on which employer's badge you happened to be wearing. The Council of Ministers settled it on 20 August. A decree-law was approved amending the regime for overtime worked in response to Storm…

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The subclass 462 visa now shows as paused on the Australian Home Affairs site, with Portugal one of 24 countries affected. A pause is not a closure, and the annual quota for Portugal is only 500 places.

Anyone planning a year in Australia got unwelcome news this week. The Work and Holiday visa for Portuguese citizens now shows as paused on the Australian Department of Home Affairs website. Portugal is one of 24 countries whose subclass 462 has been put on hold, a status published on the official country caps page. The Australian embassy in Lisbon confirmed it and pointed to the number that explains most of it: the annual quota for Portuguese applicants…

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ManpowerGroup's 2026 talent shortage study puts the Centro region at 88% of employers unable to fill vacancies, against 79% in Greater Lisbon. Nationally the figure is 82%, the fifth highest in the world.

Job hunters tend to assume the openings are all in Lisbon. Employers report something close to the opposite. Companies in central Portugal complain hardest about not finding people, and the gap to the capital runs to nine percentage points. The figures come from ManpowerGroup's 2026 talent shortage study, built on a survey of more than 39,000 employers across 41 countries. In the Centro region, 88% of organisations say they cannot fill their vacancies.…

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The Series F base rate tracks three-month Euribor, but the IGCP term sheet caps it at 2.5%. Three-month Euribor traded at 2.507% on 22 August, which puts it above the ceiling for the first time.

Portugal's most popular savings product has a brake written into its own term sheet. Euribor has just reached it. Nobody sits in a room deciding the base rate on Series F savings certificates. It is the average of three-month Euribor over the previous ten business days, rounded to three decimal places. But the same IGCP term sheet that sets out that formula adds a line that rarely makes the coverage: the base rate may not be higher than 2.50% or lower…

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The second edition of Laç(z)os Artísticos is open until 15 September with 20 mobility grants covering travel and insurance. Three are ring-fenced for young artists from Portuguese-speaking Africa and Timor-Leste.

The first round of Laç(z)os Artísticos handed out eleven grants. This one has twenty, and applications close on 15 September. The programme pays for artists to travel and develop a project outside their own country, within a bloc that combines the CPLP member states with the Ibero-American countries. Each grant is worth a maximum of €2,250 and covers the cost of the journey, health and travel insurance included. Eligible fields are visual arts, performing…

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The first round placed 49,991 students and filled 88.9% of the seats. What remains opens on Monday, and more than half of it sits in inland institutions.

There is a lot less room to manoeuvre this year for anyone who misses out. The second round of Portugal's national university competition opens on Monday, 24 August carrying 6,639 places, 42.3% fewer than the same round in 2025. The reason is straightforward. The first round took almost everything. A total of 49,991 students were placed, which works out at 88.9% of the available seats and 6,092 more students than last year. The Ministry of Education,…

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The BSC AI Factory Incubation Space Program gives startups and small firms free access to supercomputing, technical support and mentoring between 5 October and 30 March at UPTEC Asprela II. Applications close on 15 September.

Training an AI model costs money most small companies do not have. This programme aims squarely at that gap, and it does so in the most direct way available: it hands you the machine. The second call of the BSC AI Factory Incubation Space Program is open and accepts applications until 15 September. In Portugal it is run by the Foundation for Science and Technology alongside the National Centre for Advanced Computing, under the EuroHPC network of AI…

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Portugal Space has set three annual assessment rounds for the ESA's InCubed programme through to 2028. Applications never close; the assessment dates do.

An electricity grid operator can work out, without leaving the office, that a branch is growing too close to a high-voltage line. That is not science fiction and it is not expensive. It is what VESTA does — a system built by the Portuguese company Spotlite that combines satellite imagery with AI to watch vegetation along power lines, railways and roads. VESTA was funded through InCubed, the European Space Agency's industrial innovation programme for Earth…

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Portugal's education ministry placed 1,505 more teachers than last year, with 5,894 going to the regions with the deepest shortages. Acceptance closes on 18 August and staff report to schools on 1 September.

Anyone who applied has until the end of today to click accept. Portugal's education ministry has placed 20,404 teachers for the 2026/2027 school year, and the acceptance window on the AGSE platform opened on Sunday and closes on Tuesday 18 August. Those who accept report to their school on 1 September. Of the total, 19,152 are established staff moved through the internal mobility competition. The other 1,252 came in through initial recruitment, the route…

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Call COMPETE2030-2026-7 puts €45m behind knowledge-transfer work at Portugal's collaborative labs and technology centres, 85% of it European money. Only the North, Centre and Alentejo can apply.

There is fresh money for the part of Portugal's science system almost nobody writes about: the institutions sitting halfway between a university lab and a factory floor. Call COMPETE2030-2026-7 opened on 12 August with €45 million and closes at 17:00 on 15 October. It is aimed at Laboratórios Colaborativos, known as CoLABs, and Centros de Tecnologia e Inovação, the technology and innovation centres. Both are interface bodies. They exist to take research…

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The Foundation's Apoio à Internacionalização covers travel, accommodation and meals for artists, curators and programmers in performing arts, visual arts, cinema and cross-disciplinary work — and applications must land 30 days before the trip.

One Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation grant has been open since January and closes on 31 October, and unlike most competitions it has no single submission date: applications to the Apoio à Internacionalização run continuously and a decision follows within 30 days. The reference ceiling is €5,000 per project. It pays for one specific thing: getting artists, curators and programmers to events run by major international cultural institutions. Performing arts —…

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Notice PESSOAS-2026-9 funds mentoring teams for young people under child protection measures, for up to 24 months each, across the Norte, Centro and Alentejo regions. Applications opened on 3 August, with 85% ESF+ co-funding.

There is a point in the life of a young person in residential care when the system stops walking beside them and they have to do everything alone: rent a room, manage a wage, enrol on a course, book a doctor. This money is aimed squarely at that step. Notice PESSOAS-2026-9 has opened with more than €6.2 million from the European Social Fund Plus to fund teams that accompany, one by one, young people who are or have been under a child promotion and…

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15 August falls on a Saturday this year. Anyone working it at a company that stays open is owed either compensatory rest worth half the hours or a 50% pay uplift, and article 269 of the Labour Code hands the choice to the employer, not the worker.

The Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, is one of Portugal's mandatory public holidays, and this year it lands on a Saturday. For plenty of people that changes nothing at all. For anyone who works Saturdays it changes quite a lot, and what the law actually hands you is thinner than most people assume. Start with the misunderstanding that causes the most office arguments. A public holiday falling on a day you would not have worked anyway does not buy you a…

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Portaria 332/2026/1, published on 11 August, sets the rules for applications, places, assessment and external training. One new duty stands out: seven hours a month on emergency service from the second year onwards.

More than 550 pharmacists are currently working through Portugal's Residência Farmacêutica, the specialist training route that leads to the title of specialist pharmacist. Until this week they were doing it under a 2020 legal framework that never spelled out how any of it actually worked. Portaria 332/2026/1, published on 11 August, supplies the missing rulebook. The timing is the story. The first cohort is reaching the end of its training, with the first…

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The chain is putting over €45 million into the country by summer 2027. The first opening is 2 September at Forum Castelo Branco, the second 10 September at Alegro Setúbal.

Four new stores, an extension to an existing one and around 300 jobs by summer 2027. That is what Primark has under way in Portugal, backed by an investment of more than €45 million. The first two openings already have dates. Forum Castelo Branco gets the city's first Primark on 2 September. Eight days later, on 10 September, Alegro Setúbal follows. Next come GaiaShopping in Vila Nova de Gaia and central Porto, and the Porto one is worth flagging…

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