A New €1,075 Top-Up Grant Lands for Portugal's Neediest University Students This Year, as the Full Student-Aid Overhaul Slips to 2027
From 2026/27, students on the top tier of the family allowance get a new €1,075 incentive grant, paid automatically on enrolment. But the full redesign of higher-education social support — and its €2,660 average scholarship — has been pushed back to 2027/28.
Portugal is rolling out a new grant for its poorest university students this year, even as it postpones the bigger overhaul of higher-education support it had promised. From the 2026/27 academic year, students who qualify for the top tier of the abono de família (the means-tested family allowance) will receive a new €1,075 incentive grant. But the full redesign of the ensino superior social-support system — the ação social escolar, or student welfare regime — has been pushed back a further year, to 2027/28.
Who gets the €1,075, and how
The new bolsa de incentivo (incentive grant) is aimed squarely at students from the lowest-income households, identified through the first bracket of the family allowance. In the first year it is paid automatically on enrolment, with no separate means test to clear. To keep it in later years, the student has to earn it academically: finishing among the top 25 percent of classifications in their course. It sits on top of the ordinary means-tested scholarship rather than replacing it.
Why the bigger reform slipped
The government says the conditions simply are not in place to switch on the new scholarship system now. Ministers cited legislative delays that would have collided with this year’s application windows, the need to build online simulators so students and families can see what they would receive before the change, staff training, and time to test the new rules end to end. Rather than launch a half-ready system over a cohort of applicants, they have chosen to phase it in.
Some pieces do arrive for 2026/27, mostly on the housing side, where costs bite hardest. Funding for academic residences rises by more than 20 percent; the per-bed subsidy for scholarship students goes up from €134 to €161; and displaced students — those studying away from home — will receive a €161 housing top-up regardless of the type of accommodation they rent. That matters in a market where, as we reported, just 5,014 of 18,758 promised student beds are finished and room rents keep hitting new highs.
What the full overhaul will change
When it lands in 2027/28, the reform rewrites how a scholarship is calculated. Instead of a single national threshold, the formula will weigh the real cost of studying in each concelho (municipality) — tuition, food, transport and housing — against how much the family can actually contribute. The government estimates the change will lift the average grant to about €2,660 a year. The system already processes more than 100,000 applications annually, so even a modest rise in the average is a substantial commitment.
For international and returning-emigrant families with children in Portuguese public universities, the practical points are worth filing away: the grants are means-tested, applications run each autumn through the Direcção-Geral do Ensino Superior (Directorate-General for Higher Education, DGES), and eligibility leans on the same family-allowance tiers used elsewhere in the welfare system. If you are weighing the cost of a Portuguese degree, our guide to higher education for international students sets out the fees and application track, and our report on how Parliament forced the State to pay its stalled graduate tuition refund shows how contested student finance has become. This year’s intake is also navigating an unusually messy admissions season, after the minister added a special September exam round to the calendar.
