Belém Promulga the Category-B Tutor Driving Diploma at 12:52 on Wednesday — Ten-Year Licence Becomes the Tutor Threshold, Schools Lose the Mandatory First Twelve Lessons and ANIECA Brands the Reform a Road-Safety Step Backward

President António José Seguro signed off at 12:52 on Wednesday 27 May 2026 on the diploma that restructures Portugal's Regime Jurídico da Habilitação Legal para Conduzir to permit category-B (light-vehicle) learner drivers to receive their first twelve practical lessons from a family-member or friend tutor rather than from a professional driving-school instructor. The decree-law had been approved in Conselho de Ministros on 16 April 2026 and now heads to the Diário da República for publication, with entry into force scheduled for 60 days after the publication date.

The tutor threshold is the cleanest test in the new diploma. To act as a learner-driver tutor the accompanying adult must hold a valid category-B licence for at least ten consecutive years, with the licence either issued by Portugal or by another European Union member state, or — for non-EU originals — recognised in Portugal for a minimum of five years. Tutors must additionally show a clean road-criminal-record bulletin for the past five years (no convictions for road crimes, no contraordenações graves ou muito graves), complete a short tutor course delivered by IMT-credentialed providers, and carry a specific tutor insurance product that covers third-party damage caused by the learner while the tutor is in the passenger seat.

The learner side of the equation has changed materially as well. The Regime previously required candidates to clock the first twelve practical hours at an accredited escola de condução before a tutor could enter the picture. Under the new diploma the order is inverted: the twelve initial hours may be done with a tutor, with the school component now optional. Theoretical instruction continues to be delivered exclusively by accredited schools — there is no DIY route to the código exam. The diploma also tightens the consequences of skipping the optional school pre-test: candidates who go straight to the IMT practical exam without first sitting the school mock and fail the exam must wait four months before retaking it.

The Associação Nacional dos Industriais do Ensino de Condução Automóvel (ANIECA) has positioned the reform as a road-safety step backward. The industry body argues that the twelve mandatory school hours were the structural channel through which professionally-supervised hazard recognition, emergency-braking technique and roundabout protocol entered the learner-driver formation cycle. ANIECA's submission to the Conselho de Ministros consultation phase warned of a downstream sinistralidade increase, with comparative cross-EU data from Belgium and the Netherlands — where tutor-led learning has been long established — cited on both sides of the argument. The Government's impact assessment annex relied on those same datasets to argue the opposite case.

Two ancillary provisions sit alongside the main reform. Category B1 — quadricycles and tractor-style light agricultural vehicles — receives an updated formation matrix that mirrors the category-B tutor logic for rural settings where school capacity is thin. And the diploma authorises digital authentication of replaced cartas de condução via the ‘A Minha Carta’ portal, plus the deployment of identity-verification technologies inside the IMT exam centres to address fraud cases flagged during 2024-25.

For foreign residents, the practical question is whether the diploma changes the existing troca-de-carta workflow for licences issued abroad. The IMT briefed Lusa on Wednesday that the exchange routes — EU automatic, Convenção de Viena and third-country with practical-exam retake — are unchanged. The tutor reform applies only to new licence issuance from scratch under the category-B Portuguese formation cycle.