Politics 27 September 2026

Pharmacies have 20 days to get ready for Portugal's new free-medicine rule

The decree changing how free prescriptions are costed for Portugal's poorest pensioners takes effect on 17 October, and it carries a guarantee for anyone the pharmacy fails to warn about the cheaper option.

The clock started on 18 August. Decree-Law 169/2026 says in its final article that it takes effect 60 days after publication, which lands on 17 October. From that date, it’s the rule pharmacies apply at the counter. That’s 20 days away.

We explained how the free-medicine rule changes when the decree came out: recipients of the complemento solidário para idosos, Portugal’s top-up for pensioners on the lowest incomes, still take their medicines without paying anything, but the state stops covering 100% of whichever pack they pick and instead covers 100% of the reference price for that medicine’s homogeneous group — usually the cheapest generic. Picking the pricier brand stops being free: the difference is now the patient’s to cover.

The guarantee the law wrote in

What the same decree also contains, and what we didn’t report in August, is a brand-new article — 2.º-A, “User guarantees”. Stripped of the legal phrasing, it says that if a pharmacy fails its duties to dispense and inform (warning about the cheaper alternative, explaining the difference) already set out in Portugal’s medicines law, the patient still gets the medicine they chose, at no extra cost. In practice, the risk of a mistake or an oversight at the counter now sits with the pharmacy, not with the pocket of someone who has the least room to absorb it.

More than 220,000 elderly people received free medicines under the solidarity supplement in 2026 alone. For them — often with no margin for an extra two or three euros a box — the 20 days until 17 October stop being a date on a calendar and become a deadline for the corner pharmacy to get ready.

It has been a long road for a two-clause change. The cabinet approved the text on 9 April, the President signed it on 7 August, and it only reaches the counter now, more than six months later. Anyone unsure how it affects them is better off asking at the pharmacy before 17 October than after.

By Tomás Vasconcelos

Image: JnpoJuwan / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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