An Azorean Student Pays at Most 89 Euros to Fly to the Mainland, and the Socialists Want the Rest of the Journey Off the Tax Bill

An Azorean school leaver who gets into a mainland university acquires a second household. The family keeps the home it already has, and starts paying rent, food and airfares in a city 1,500 kilometres away. On Sunday in Horta, on the island of Faial, the leader of the PS/Açores told the regional Socialist Youth congress that the state should recognise the second bill more fully than it does.

Francisco César announced two proposals. The first is a Complemento Regional de Alojamento Estudantil (Regional Student Accommodation Supplement), a monthly payment aimed at what families still pay for housing after existing public support runs out. It would cover students displaced to another island, to the mainland or to Madeira, scholarship holders and non-holders alike, with amounts scaled to household income and to the expense actually incurred. First application is pencilled in for the 2027/2028 academic year.

The second is narrower and more interesting: that the cost of a displaced student's flights be treated as an education expense for the purposes of the IRS (personal income tax) deduction. The proposal is explicit that what would be deducted is the amount left after the mobility subsidy has reimbursed its share. "Travelling in order to study is part of the cost of studying," César said.

What already exists

Two schemes sit underneath the proposals, and both matter for reading them.

Air travel between the Azores and the mainland is covered by the subsídio social de mobilidade (social mobility subsidy), governed by Decreto-Lei n.º 37-A/2025 as amended. It works by reimbursement: the passenger buys the ticket and claims back the difference between the eligible cost and the amount the law says they must bear themselves. For Azorean students that ceiling is 89 euros; for residents generally it is 119. In June, parliament amended the scheme by apreciação parlamentar, and Lei n.º 23/2026 of 1 June rewrote Article 4 to remove any maximum on the eligible cost of the ticket, and to forbid reducing or fractioning the passenger's contribution according to whether the ticket is one-way or return.

On the housing side, the national scholarship regulation already pays a displaced student an accommodation supplement. Inside a public residence it is capped at 17.5 percent of the Indexante dos Apoios Sociais (Social Support Index); for a student who asked for a residence place and did not get one, the cap rises to 30 percent of the same index. Those percentages were raised in August, taking the outside-residence figure to about 161 euros a month, and the requirement to produce a rental contract was dropped.

The gap the proposals aim at

So a displaced Azorean student is already subsidised twice, and the proposals are about the residue in each case. On housing, 161 euros a month is a fraction of a room in Lisbon or Porto, and the regional supplement would target what is left. On travel, the 89 euro cap is real but it is per journey, not per year, and a student who goes home at Christmas, Easter and the end of term has bought several of them.

A caution worth stating plainly: these are opposition proposals announced at a party congress, by a party not in office in the region, the accommodation supplement is dated to 2027/2028, and neither has a costing attached. The IRS measure also cuts across national tax law rather than regional competence, which is why it is framed as a joint proposal with the Socialist Youth rather than as a regional decree.

What gives the announcement more weight than the usual congress list is the context around it. The Azores have spent the summer arguing about the price of flying: Ponta Delgada's chamber of commerce asked the competition regulator on Friday why Lisbon to the Azores costs more than Cabo Verde to the Azores. Students are the constituency where that argument is hardest to answer.