ASF's Fundo de Acidentes de Trabalho Settles €10.4 Million to Sinistrados and Pensionistas in 2025 — €52 Million Reimbursed to Insurers on Pension Updates as 2,001 Indemnity Files Sit Inside the FAT Perimeter

The Autoridade de Supervisão de Seguros e Fundos de Pensões released its 2025 statistical reading of the Fundo de Acidentes de Trabalho on Monday 18 May 2026, anchoring the workplace-accident safety-net at €10.4 million paid directly to sinistrados and pensionistas across the year, up 1.47% on 2024. Behind that headline sits a much larger transfer rail running between the FAT and the private accident-insurance market: €52 million reimbursed to the seguradoras that carry the underlying employer policies, a 6.8% step-up that accounts for 83.4% of the FAT's full €62-million-plus spend for the year.

The FAT is the residual public mechanism inside the Portuguese workplace-accident architecture, which is otherwise structured around a compulsory employer-paid insurance policy that every entidade empregadora must hold under Lei n.º 98/2009 (the Regime de Reparação de Acidentes de Trabalho). Where a private insurer carries an open claim, the FAT does not pay the worker directly — it back-stops the seguradora's pension-update obligations, top-ups for third-person assistance allowances and the statutory duodécimo adicional (the legal thirteenth-payment equivalent). Where no insurance exists or the insurer is in liquidation, the FAT picks up the direct payment to the injured worker and to the surviving dependents in fatal cases.

What the 2025 Numbers Actually Carry

The €10.4 million paid in 2025 to sinistrados and pensionistas covered 2,001 indemnity processes managed by the FAT through 31 December — of which 1,874 referred to processes with pensions in payment, the remaining 127 covering one-off indemnities, lump-sum settlements and provisional payments inside contested files. The pension-in-payment cohort is structurally sticky: most are partial-permanent-incapacity (IPP) pensions running for the lifetime of the recipient, plus surviving-dependent pensions in fatal-accident files that continue until the child cohort exits the threshold (18 for minors, 25 if in full-time education, no upper bound for surviving spouses).

The €52 million in seguradora reimbursements breaks out across three statutory channels: the annual pension-update mechanic that lifts open pensions in line with the Indexante de Apoios Sociais (IAS) and any extraordinary update the Government legislates; the duodécimo adicional top-up that converts the standard twelve-month pension schedule into thirteen payments; and the third-person assistance allowance updates that lift the supplemental payment for high-incapacity files where the worker needs full-time care. The 6.8% YoY step-up reflects both the 2025 IAS update and the gradual ageing of the pension-in-payment book.

The Receita Side — How the FAT Gets Funded

The FAT is not tax-funded. Its receita comes overwhelmingly from two parafiscal levies inside the workplace-accident insurance system. The principal source — €142.5 million in 2025 — is a 0.15% taxa on insured wages, charged every time an accident-insurance premium is processed by a private seguradora. That levy sits on top of the standard employer premium and feeds the FAT automatically. The second source — €10.1 million in 2025 — is a 0.85% levy on the capital de remição for pensions in payment and on the mathematical provision behind the supplemental third-person assistance benefits. Together, those two lines carried €152.6 million of inflow against the year's spending envelope.

The arithmetic implies that the FAT is currently running a substantial annual surplus, which feeds the reserve buffer that backstops the long-tail pension obligations and the insurance-market-failure scenarios. ASF's reading does not publish a current reserve total in the public excerpts of the report, but the regulator's wider 2025 supervisory bulletin separately noted that the combined revenue stream from insurance companies and from administrative fines (coimas) rose 15.36% versus 2024 — suggesting the broader insurance-sector levy take is on a multi-year upward path that comfortably absorbs the FAT's pension growth.

The Wider Não Vida Market Frame

The FAT report sits alongside ASF's quarterly Relatório de Evolução da Atividade Seguradora, which read the wider non-life (Não Vida) market as growing 9.2% in 2025. Inside that aggregate, the Acidentes de Trabalho line specifically grew 8.4%, the Doença (health) line carried the strongest segment growth at 12.3%, Automóvel posted 9.9%, and Incêndio e Outros Danos rose 7.9%. The workplace-accident segment growth tracks broadly with the underlying wage base and the rising headcount inside the Portuguese workforce: public-sector employment alone hit a series-record 767,094 in Q1 2026 and the private-side payroll has continued to expand.

Implication for the FAT: the 0.15% wage-base levy automatically grows with both the headcount and the average insured wage, which gives the fund a structural revenue tailwind that has, so far, comfortably outpaced the pension-update obligations on the spending side. The 1.47% growth in direct-payment outflows in 2025 is well below both the wage-base growth and the wider Não Vida market expansion — consistent with a fund whose long-tail pension obligations grow slowly while its receita side scales with the underlying labour market.

The Regulatory Backdrop

The release lands in the same week that the Government reopened the broader workplace-safety policy file. The April 17 Conselho de Ministros approved a national strategy to reduce the workplace-accident rate, and the Council also reinstated the original labour-reform draft on fixed-term contracts and outsourcing on 14 May, which carries indirect knock-on effects on the workplace-accident perimeter (precarious-contract workers historically carry a higher accident frequency than permanent staff in the construction, hospitality and warehousing sectors). The pending CIP-UGT-CGTP sectoral consultation on the broader Health and Safety at Work framework, opened by the Government in July 2025, is now back in active negotiation.

Separately, ASF is preparing the PRIIPs and advertising rule changes on the insurance side that walked through the regulator's consultation in early May, and the Government's wider supervisory-architecture review is due to deliver its commission report on the independence of regulatory entities later this year. None of those workstreams directly touches the FAT, but they shape the broader supervisory perimeter inside which the fund sits.

What This Means for Foreign Residents and Employers

• If you employ anyone in Portugal — including a single empregada doméstica: a workplace-accident insurance policy is compulsory under Lei n.º 98/2009. The premium is set by the seguradora on a risk-class basis (clerical staff sit at the bottom of the rate card; construction, agriculture and transport at the top), and the 0.15% FAT levy is included automatically. Missing this policy is one of the most common findings in Autoridade para as Condições do Trabalho (ACT) inspections and triggers a fine sequence on top of full liability for any uncovered accident.
• If you are a foreign-resident worker injured on the job: the insurance route is the first call, not the SNS reimbursement chain. The employer's policy carries the medical treatment, the absent-pay window (during temporary incapacity), the partial or permanent disability pension if the residual incapacity is above the statutory threshold, and the survivor pension in fatal cases. The FAT picks up the same chain if the employer was uninsured, if the seguradora is in liquidation, or if the file is contested and pending resolution.
• If you are self-employed (trabalhador independente): the standard accident-insurance policy is optional but recommended, since the Segurança Social subsídio por doença route is materially less generous than a private accident-insurance payout for an on-the-job injury. The premium is tax-deductible against Categoria B income.
• If you are receiving a long-running FAT-administered pension from a prior workplace accident: the annual update is automatic on the IAS schedule each January, the duodécimo adicional is paid in November, and the third-person assistance supplement is reviewed if your clinical status changes (apply through the seguradora or directly to the FAT's caixa-correio at the ASF building in Lisboa).
• If a workplace accident happens and the insurer disputes coverage: the file moves to the Tribunal do Trabalho with mandatory mediation through the conciliação stage at the Ministério Público. The FAT's payments during contested files are provisional and subject to settlement once the court resolves the coverage question. Workers should keep all medical certificates, the boletim de acidente de trabalho, and the seguradora correspondence in a single dossier — the documentary chain materially shapes the outcome at conciliação.

The FAT's 2025 statistical reading is a quiet but load-bearing document inside the wider Portuguese social-insurance architecture. The headline numbers are small compared with the broader Segurança Social envelope, but the fund covers the cohort of workers whose primary safety net failed somewhere upstream — through an uninsured employer, a defunct seguradora, or a contested file in court. The 2025 reading shows that safety net is solvent, well-funded by the parafiscal levy stack, and growing in line with the wider workforce. For the population it serves, that solvency is the only number that matters.