Portugal has given its government 180 days to unlock homes trapped in undivided estates
Law 49/2026 was published on Monday. It does not create the process for selling a property stuck in an unshared inheritance — it authorises the government to create one, and starts the clock.
Law 49/2026 was published in Portugal’s official gazette on Monday. It is the statute reported everywhere as the one that unblocks the sale of houses stranded in inheritances nobody has divided. If you own a share of one and were planning to act this week, the useful thing to know is that nothing has changed.
What was published is an enabling law. It does not create the special sale process. It authorises the government to create it, and gives it 180 days from entry into force to do so. Until that work is done, the mechanism does not exist.
What is actually being authorised
Two regimes. The first is the special process for selling immovable property forming part of an undivided estate — the urgent procedure that will let a single heir ask a court to order the sale when the heirs cannot agree. The second went almost unnoticed: a legal regime for succession arbitration determined by the person making the will, meaning you will be able to specify in advance that disputes over your estate are settled by arbitration rather than in court.
The same authorisation also allows amendments to the Civil Code, the Civil Procedure Code and the medically assisted reproduction regime.
Settled already, and still open
Worth separating the two. The text parliament passed does fix several boundaries the government has to respect when it drafts.
The family home is excluded from the special sale process unless the surviving spouse expressly consents, a protection extended to unmarried partners through a PSD amendment accepted in committee. Insolvent estates are excluded too. And the new regime will apply to every estate that is open and undivided when it takes effect, which is a consequential choice: it reaches back to old cases rather than only future ones.
Two new figures appear. One is an executor with distribution powers, concentrating administration, settlement and division of the estate in a third party and taking the initiative away from the heirs. The other lets the administration of an estate pass to any other person by simple majority among the heirs, except where the head of the estate is the surviving spouse — a measure that started as an Iniciativa Liberal bill in June and was folded in during committee.
One caveat explains the reference to assisted reproduction: the right to divide the estate cannot be exercised where consent exists for posthumous insemination, for three years after the succession opens or until a live birth, while the permitted procedures are pending.
What remains unwritten is everything you would actually need on the day: how the process runs, in which court, at what cost, on what timetable, and the rules on who may serve as executor and how, which the final text hands expressly to the government.
The deadline is the story
The final vote carried with the PSD, CDS-PP, PS, IL and JPP in favour, Chega and PAN abstaining, and the PCP, BE and Livre against. The President signed it on 7 August. Monday’s publication closes the parliamentary route and starts the clock.
Which is why July’s approval was a story and today is a different one. What changed is not the position of heirs; it is that the government now has a date. Legislative authorisations lapse if they go unused, and when they lapse the whole thing goes back to parliament. February is the month to check.
Image: Rakoon / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
