A Vote Next Wednesday Decides Whether Single Parents Are Included in Portugal's Six-Month Paid Parental Leave

Friday was the deadline for parties in the Assembleia da República (Assembly of the Republic) to file amendments to the citizens' bill extending initial parental leave to six months on full pay. The committee vote follows next Wednesday. Between those two dates sits a question that had not been on the table when the bill was approved in principle: whether single parents get the extension at all.

The bill is an iniciativa legislativa de cidadãos, a legislative initiative brought by a group of citizens rather than by a party, and it proposes extending the initial parental leave to 180 days paid at 100 percent, independently of how the leave is split between parents. That last clause is where the argument is.

The sharing condition

The government wants the extension to six months to depend on the leave being divided in half between the two members of a couple. The Labour Minister has defended the condition as a way of avoiding what she called "perverse effects" for women, the reasoning being that a long leave taken almost entirely by mothers entrenches the assumption that mothers are the ones who disappear from work.

The citizens who brought the bill disagree, and so do parties on the left. The Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) has proposed dropping the sharing requirement for the first six months altogether, and instead offering an extra 60 days, also at 100 percent, where both parents take an equal number of days. On that design, a couple who split the leave evenly reach eight months of fully paid leave, and a couple who do not still reach six. Livre has proposed eight months. Those amendments were reported on Friday by Observador.

Where single parents come in

A household with one parent cannot satisfy a sharing condition, which makes the design question immediate rather than theoretical. According to Observador, the PSD, the party in government, filed its amendment in mid-August and proposed that single-parent families be excluded from the extension to six months.

The Bloco de Esquerda has gone the other way and proposed that a single parent's initial parental leave should run for a full year at 100 percent. The logic is symmetrical to the government's: if a two-parent household can reach six or eight months by combining two entitlements, a one-parent household cannot reach the same total without the leave being longer on its own terms.

There is a tension in that worth naming. The reason the government gave for the sharing condition is that leave taken overwhelmingly by mothers damages women at work. Single-parent households in Portugal are mostly headed by mothers, and under the PSD amendment they would be the households left on the shorter leave.

What the law says today

Article 40 of the Código do Trabalho (Labour Code) currently gives working parents 120 or 150 consecutive days of initial parental leave on the birth of a child, which they may share after the birth. A further 30 days are added where each parent takes an exclusive period of 30 consecutive days, or two blocks of 15. The social security subsidy pays the full reference wage over the shorter option and a reduced rate over the longer one; we set out how the calculation works in our guide to claiming subsídio parental.

None of this changes yet. The bill ties its own entry into force to the state budget following its publication, which means the earliest it can reach a payslip is 2027. Parliament has been over this ground before, and the sharing condition has been the sticking point each time.

What to watch

Wednesday's committee vote is the one that settles the text. If you are a foreign resident working in Portugal with a child due next year, the two numbers to follow are whether the extension survives without the sharing condition, and whether single-parent households are inside or outside it. Both are decided in the same sitting, and neither is decided by the headline figure of 180 days.