The Certificado Energético in Portugal in 2026: A Practical Guide to the Certificate You Need Before You Sell or Let, the Mandatory Site Visit, the Ten-Year Validity, and What Registration Costs

If you are buying, selling or renting a home in Portugal, one document will come up before any of the others: the certificado energético, the energy certificate. It is the piece of paper that puts a letter grade on the property and tells you, in theory, how much energy it takes to keep the place comfortable. It is also a legal condition of the transaction, with fines attached for the people who skip it.

This guide sets out who has to obtain one, when, what it must contain, how long it lasts, what it costs to register and what happens when the rule is ignored. Everything here comes from the regime itself: Decreto-Lei n.º 101-D/2020 of 7 December, which created the Sistema de Certificação Energética dos Edifícios (SCE, the Energy Certification System for Buildings), and Portaria n.º 138-H/2021 of 1 July, which fixes the registration charges.

Who actually needs a certificate

Article 18 of the decree lists the situations that trigger the obligation. For most readers, only one of them matters: a building must be certified at the moment of its sale, its transfer in settlement of a debt (dação em cumprimento), its letting, or a trespasse where the transfer includes the physical space the business occupies. The trespasse itself is dealt with in our guide to renting a shop or office in Portugal.

The other triggers are the construction of new buildings, major renovations, the periodic assessment of large commercial and service buildings, publicly owned and occupied buildings frequently visited by the public with more than 250 square metres of useful floor area, and buildings applying for energy performance funding or tax benefits where certification is a condition of the application.

A "major renovation", as the decree defines it, is a renovation where the estimated total cost of the works on the building's components comes to more than 25 percent of the value of the whole building, using the average construction value per square metre applied under Articles 39 and 62 of the municipal property tax code.

When you do not need one

Article 18(2) sets out the exceptions, and several of them are worth knowing because they come up in ordinary life.

• Sales or transfers in settlement of a debt to a co-owner, to the tenant, or to an expropriating authority, when they arise out of enforcement or insolvency proceedings, or when the building is being bought for total demolition, subject to prior confirmation by the licensing authority.
• Transfers for no consideration: donations, legacies and inheritances. Note that this is about ownership changing hands for nothing, not about arrangements such as usufruct.
• Letting the landlord's own habitual residence for less than four months.
• Letting to the person who was the tenant immediately before the new agreement.
• Buildings in ruins.
• Military infrastructure and buildings subject to control and confidentiality rules, including those used by security forces and intelligence services.

Separately, Article 9 exempts certain building types from the performance requirements altogether: non-residential industrial, livestock and agricultural installations and workshops with no heating or cooling for human comfort, places of worship, buildings used exclusively as unconditioned car parks, warehouses where human presence does not exceed two hours a day or an occupancy of 0.025 people per square metre, and buildings classified or in the process of being classified as heritage. Those exemptions are recognised by the authority licensing the urban planning operation, not claimed unilaterally.

One certificate per what, exactly

Article 19 answers the question people get wrong most often. Certification is carried out for the smallest independently usable unit.

In a building held in total ownership with no floors or divisions capable of independent use, one certificate covers the whole building. In a building held in total ownership that does have such divisions, there is one certificate per division. In a building under horizontal property, the ordinary Portuguese apartment block, there is one certificate per autonomous fraction. So the flat you are buying needs its own certificate; the building's does not do.

Certificates come in two types by use: habitação for housing, and comércio e serviços for commerce and services. Mixed-use buildings are certified fraction by fraction according to what each one is used for.

What the certificate is, and what it must say

Since the 2020 regime, a certificate is a digital document with its own number, generated and digitally signed by the Portal SCE from information the qualified expert submits in a restricted-access area. There are three documents in the family: the pré-certificado energético, issued before construction or renovation begins; the certificado energético proper, issued at the end of the works or before the use permit is obtained; and a provisional SCE declaration for cases where the performance assessment cannot be carried out.

Article 20(3) sets the minimum content. The certificate must state the building's energy performance and its energy class; measures for improving that performance, reducing energy needs and optimising health, comfort and indoor air quality; a description of the building's components; and other information and indicators.

That second item is the part most people ignore and the part that is actually worth reading. The improvement measures are the certificate's own list of what is wrong with the building and what fixing it would involve.

The expert, and the visit that cannot be skipped

Only a perito qualificado (PQ), a qualified expert holding the professional title for energy certification under Lei n.º 58/2013, can issue a certificate.

Article 21(3) is categorical: the expert must visit the site or the building to gather the information needed, with access to all of its spaces. Article 21(4) makes the issue of the certificate conditional on the expert confirming, through that visit, that the documents received match the reality as designed or built. A certificate issued without the visit is invalid under Article 23(4).

That matters practically. If somebody offers to produce a certificate for your flat from photographs and the caderneta predial, what they are offering is a document that the decree itself says has no effect.

You, as owner, have to hand the expert what they need. For an existing building that is typically the ficha técnica da habitação, the caderneta predial, the land registry certificate, any previous certificate where this is a re-issue or update, and a signed declaration of the certification process.

How long it lasts

Article 23 sets validity by type of certificate rather than by a single rule.

• Pre-certificates: 10 years.
• Certificates: 10 years.
• Certificates for large commercial and service buildings: 8 years.
• First certificates for those buildings, issued for new construction or major renovation: 3 years.
• Certificates for large commercial and service buildings in operation without the required maintenance plan: 1 year.
• Certificates for commercial and service buildings without the technical systems inspection report, where one is required: 1 year.
• Certificates for buildings em tosco, meaning a shell with no interior finishes or technical systems installed and no known details of actual use: 1 year, extendable on request to ADENE for the same period until the components are installed.

A certificate can be updated during its life, but updating it does not extend its validity. And a certificate is invalid if it carries a watermark or stamp declaring it so, if it has expired, if it is not registered on the Portal SCE, if a later certificate exists for the same building, if it was issued without the mandatory visit, or if errors or omissions have been detected in it.

The practical test for a buyer or tenant is simple. Take the number on the document and look it up on the Portal SCE. If it is not registered there, it is not a certificate.

What it costs to register

Two different sums are involved, and only one of them is fixed by law.

The expert's own fee is not regulated. The registration charge on the Portal SCE is, and Annex III to Portaria n.º 138-H/2021 sets it out. As published in 2021, and before VAT at the legal rate, the housing figures were 28.00 euros for a T0 or T1, 40.50 euros for a T2 or T3, 55.00 euros for a T4 or T5, and 65.00 euros for a T6 or larger.

For commerce and services the charge goes by useful floor area: 135.00 euros up to 250 square metres, 350.00 euros above 250 and up to 500, 750.00 euros above 500 and up to 5,000, and 950.00 euros above 5,000. Registering an SCE technician and issuing their qualification card costs 25.00 euros.

Those are base values, not this year's. Point 2 of the annex indexes them annually to the consumer price index for mainland Portugal excluding housing, as published by the Instituto Nacional de Estatística, and point 3 says the updated figures are set by an aviso from the director-general of the Direção-Geral de Energia e Geologia (DGEG) and published on the DGEG website. Check that before budgeting.

Three discounts and exemptions are written into the same annex. Updates made during a certificate's validity that do not extend it are free. A certificate that results from a pre-certificate gets a 50 percent reduction. And housing certificates for social housing owned by public administration bodies or by private social solidarity institutions also get 50 percent off.

Where the money goes is set by Article 28 of the decree: 87 percent to ADENE, which manages the system, 10 percent to the Fundo Ambiental, and 3 percent to DGEG, which supervises and inspects it.

The obligations nobody tells you about

Article 29 lists the owner's duties, and one of them has a timing requirement that is easy to miss. You must give the buyer, tenant or acquirer a copy of the certificate, or digital access to its content, before the promissory contract of sale, lease, transfer in settlement or trespasse is signed, and hand over the original before the definitive contract. Not at the deed. Before the promise.

Three other duties sit on the other parties to the transaction.

Notaries, and anyone else with power to authenticate private documents, must record the certificate number in the deed or the authentication (Article 31). Estate agencies must state the energy class in every advertisement published for one of these transactions (Article 32). And the platforms that carry those advertisements must refuse to publish, or withdraw, any listing without an energy class, and must build in a tool that interoperates with the Portal SCE to validate the class shown (Article 33).

Where the certificate has to be displayed rather than merely produced, Article 22 says the first page goes at the entrance of the building, in a place clearly visible to the public.

The fines

Article 35 sets a single band for the offences that matter here: 250 to 3,740 euros for individuals, and 2,500 to 44,890 euros for companies.

That band covers failure to meet the requirements for new buildings and for renovations and major renovations, failure by owners to meet most of their Article 29 duties including the obligation to obtain the certificate and to hand it over in time, failure by estate agencies to state the energy class, and failure by advertising platforms to keep unclassified listings off their sites.

Negligence is punishable, with the minimum and maximum halved. Accessory sanctions are available for up to two years, including suspension of licences and loss of public subsidies.

Enforcement is split. The municipal council handles the building requirement offences. DGEG handles the owner, estate agency and advertiser offences. Fines imposed by a council go entirely to that council; fines imposed by DGEG are split 60 percent to the State and 40 percent to the Fundo Ambiental.

Reading the certificate as a buyer or tenant

Treat the letter grade as the headline and the improvement measures as the story. A poor class on an older Portuguese flat usually means single glazing, an uninsulated envelope and electric water heating, and the certificate will normally say so in its list of components and its proposed measures. What that costs to run month to month depends on the contract you sign, which is covered in our guide to setting up household electricity and gas. That list is the closest thing to an independent survey of the building's running costs you will get for the price of a registration fee.

Two follow-ups are worth making. Check the issue date against the ten-year validity, because a certificate issued for a sale a decade ago may be at the end of its life and will say nothing about work done since. And check the number on the Portal SCE, because an unregistered certificate is legally worthless however convincing the PDF looks.

If the class is poor and you intend to improve it, note that the certificate is also the instrument used to prove improvement: Article 34 of the decree ties financial incentives for renovation to the energy savings achieved, measured by comparing the certificates issued before and after the work. Households on a low income should also check whether they qualify for the tarifa social de energia, which is a separate scheme with its own income test.

Sources

This guide is written from official Portuguese and EU sources.

• Diário da República, Decreto-Lei n.º 101-D/2020, de 7 de dezembro, consolidated text (Sistema de Certificação Energética dos Edifícios) (Portuguese only)
• Diário da República, Portaria n.º 138-H/2021, de 1 de julho, Anexo III (registration values for energy certificates on the Portal SCE) (Portuguese only)