Consignação do IRS in Portugal in 2026: A Practical Guide to Giving 1 Percent of Your Income Tax Away at No Cost to Yourself, the End-of-March Route, and the 5,517 Entities on the List

There is a line on the Portuguese income tax return that costs you nothing and that most people leave blank. It lets you tell the tax authority to send 1 percent of the IRS you already owe to a charity, a church, an environmental body or a cultural institution, instead of into the general budget. You do not pay more tax. You do not get a smaller refund. The money comes out of the State's share, not yours.

That mechanism is the consignação do IRS. There is a second, separate one alongside it, the consignação do IVA, which works differently and does cost you something. The two get confused constantly, including by people who mean well, so this guide separates them.

Everything below applies to anyone who files a Portuguese IRS return, whatever passport they hold. If you are tax resident here and you file, the option is on your form.

The short version

• Consignação do IRS. You direct 1 percent of the tax assessed on your annual return to an eligible entity. It is free to you: the amount is taken from the portion of the tax that would otherwise stay with the State.
• Consignação do IVA. You direct the value of your dedução pela exigência de fatura, the invoice-requirement deduction, to the same entity. This one has a price: it is a deduction you are giving up, so you get a smaller refund or pay more.
• You pick one entity. The routes into the scheme are alternatives to each other, not a menu you can combine.
• Two ways to do it. Register the entity in advance on the Portal das Finanças, or fill in Quadro 11 on the front page of the declaration when you file.

Who you can give it to, and how much

The entity has to work in one of six areas: social or solidarity, religious, environmental, cultural, sporting, or youth and student.

The percentage depends on which. You can consign 1 percent of your assessed IRS to:

• an instituição particular de solidariedade social (private social solidarity institution), an IPSS;
• a legal person of public utility with charitable, assistance or humanitarian purposes;
• a church or religious community established in Portugal;
• an environmental body with public utility status;
• a cultural institution with public utility status.

You can consign 0.5 percent to a youth association, an association of a youth character, or a student association.

The 1 percent figure is recent. Until Lei n.º 42/2024 of 14 November it was 0.5 percent across the board. That law doubled it in three places at once: Article 152 of the IRS Code, Article 14 of Lei n.º 35/98 governing environmental non-governmental organisations, and Article 32 of Lei n.º 16/2001, the Religious Freedom Law. The increase applies to tax assessed on income earned in 2024 and later, which means it has been running for two filing seasons. The youth and student route was left at 0.5 percent.

The three legal doors, and why you can only walk through one

The scheme looks like one thing and is in fact three parallel regimes that happen to work the same way.

Article 32 of the Religious Freedom Law carries the religious route. Its paragraph 4 lets you direct 1 percent of your assessed IRS, for religious or charitable purposes, to a church or religious community established in the country, provided that body has applied for the tax benefit. Its paragraph 6 is the door for everybody else: a taxpayer who does not use paragraph 4 may make an equivalent consignação to a public-utility legal person with charitable, assistance or humanitarian purposes, or to an IPSS. That paragraph is why a food bank and a parish are on the same list.

Article 14 of Lei n.º 35/98 carries the environmental route, on the same terms: 1 percent, to an environmental body with public utility status, provided the body has requested the benefit.

Article 152 of the IRS Code carries the cultural, youth and sporting route: 1 percent to a public-utility legal person carrying on activities of a cultural, youth or sporting nature and interest.

Paragraph 6 of Article 152 is the sentence that matters when you are choosing. The consignação under that article is not cumulative with the one under Lei n.º 16/2001 or the one under Lei n.º 35/98. They are alternatives. One taxpayer, one entity, one percent.

The list

You cannot give to any organisation you like. The entity has to have applied and been accepted, and the tax authority publishes the resulting list.

Article 152 requires the Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira (Tax and Customs Authority) to publish, on the electronic declarations page and by the first day of the annual filing window, every entity in a position to benefit. In practice the AT keeps a permanent page of these lists, one spreadsheet per fiscal year, going back to 2015.

The current list for the religious and solidarity route, covering fiscal year 2025 and dated 9 September 2026, carries 5,517 entities. They are listed alphabetically with their NIF and their locality, and the locality field is the fastest way to find something near you. Lisbon accounts for 588 of them, Porto for 243, Coimbra for 93 and Braga for 89, but the long tail runs through parishes and villages across the country.

The practical point is the NIF. When you fill in the form you identify the entity by its taxpayer number, not by its name, so the spreadsheet is where you go to get the number right.

How to actually do it

There are three moments at which you can make the choice, and they suit different people.

1. In advance, on the Portal das Finanças

Until the end of March, you can register your chosen entity before the filing season even opens. On the Portal das Finanças, go to Dados do Agregado IRS and then Entidade a Consignar IRS/IVA, and indicate the entity. The system then fills that information into your declaration automatically.

This route has a feature worth knowing about. Article 153 of the IRS Code, which created it, says that if you neither confirm nor submit a return, the consignação previously communicated on the Portal is the one that counts. Registering in advance therefore survives the case where you simply never file, which is the case in which people most often lose the option by accident.

2. Before submitting the IRS Automático

If your return is one of the ones the tax authority pre-fills and you are accepting it as it stands, select the consignação option before you submit, and choose what you want to give: the IRS, the IVA, or both.

3. On the declaration itself

If you are filling in a Modelo 3 by hand, the consignação lives in Quadro 11 of the folha de rosto, the front page. You give three things: the type of entity, its NIF, and which of the two consignações you are making.

If you are not sure how the rest of the return works, our guide to filing the annual IRS declaration covers the window, the anexos and the pre-filled version.

The IVA consignação, which is the one that costs money

This is the part people get wrong, so it is worth being blunt: consigning your IVA is a donation out of your own pocket. The AT says so on its own page. You receive a smaller refund, or you pay more tax, and the cost is exactly equal to the deduction you are giving up.

What you are giving up is the deduction under Article 78.º-F of the IRS Code. That article lets you deduct from your tax 15 percent of the IVA borne by any member of your household on invoices for services in a defined list of sectors, with a global ceiling of 250 euros per household. The sectors are vehicle maintenance and repair; motorcycle maintenance and repair; accommodation, restaurants and similar; hairdressing salons and beauty parlours; and veterinary activities. The 2026 State Budget, Lei n.º 73-A/2025 of 30 December, added a cultural block to that list: retail sale of books in specialist shops, theatre, music, dance and other artistic and literary activities, the operation of performance venues, libraries and archives, museums, and historic sites and monuments.

One carve-out inside that list is worth knowing about even if you never consign anything: a restaurant or accommodation invoice does not count here if it has already been taken into account as an education expense. You cannot have the same invoice twice.

Separately, and counting toward the same 250 euro ceiling, the article allows a deduction of 100 percent of the IVA on monthly passes or tickets for public passenger transport.

For the mechanics of getting those invoices to count in the first place, see our guide to validating invoices on e-Fatura.

Two limits on the IVA side. First, the incentive goes to the same entity you chose for the IRS consignação, not to a different one: Article 78.º-F sets that out route by route. Second, it cannot go to a youth, student or youth-character association.

Youth and student associations: a different door entirely

The 0.5 percent route for youth and student associations runs on its own track, regulated by Portaria n.º 798/2022 of 17 November, under Article 14 of Lei n.º 23/2006 as amended by Lei n.º 57/2019.

For the reader the effect is the same: you name the association and 0.5 percent of your assessed IRS goes to it. For the association, the paperwork is separate. It applies to the Instituto Português do Desporto e Juventude (Portuguese Institute of Sport and Youth), the IPDJ, by email, proves its recognition as a youth, youth-character or student association, and asks to be registered as eligible. The deadline is 30 September of the fiscal year whose tax is to be consigned, which is earlier than most organisations expect.

Two rules in that ordinance are worth passing on to any association you are involved with. An entity that benefited from the consignação in the immediately preceding year does not have to reapply in later years, unless the benefit is interrupted because a legal condition stopped being met; if it is interrupted, it has to apply again within the same deadline. And an entity that stops meeting the conditions in any later year has to tell the IPDJ by 30 September of the year concerned.

How the scheme got to where it is

Two changes explain why advice you read from a few years ago may be out of date.

The first is Article 153 of the IRS Code, the provision that lets you name your entity on the Portal before you file rather than on the form itself. It was added by Lei n.º 7-A/2016 of 30 March, but it did not come into force until 1 January 2018: a transitional rule in Lei n.º 42/2016 held it back, so that consignações relating to 2016 income still had to be made when the return was confirmed or filed, or through a replacement declaration. The advance route is therefore only eight filing seasons old.

The second is the quota itself. Lei n.º 42/2024 was approved in the Assembleia da República on 11 October 2024, promulgated on 4 November and published on 14 November, coming into force the following day. It was the fourth amendment to the Religious Freedom Law and the third to the environmental NGO statute, and its whole purpose was the single word in its object: to raise the consignação to 1 percent. Anything that still says 0.5 percent for a church, an IPSS, an environmental body or a cultural institution is describing the pre-2024 rule.

What happens after you file

Article 152 sets out the back end. The note of assessment you receive, the nota demonstrativa da liquidação, has to identify the entity you chose and state the amount consigned, so you can confirm the choice registered. The sums due to the beneficiaries are entered under their own heading in the State Budget. And for returns filed within the legal deadline, the money has to be transferred to the beneficiary entities by 31 March of the year following the one in which the declaration was filed.

If your assessment is later corrected, the consigned amount is corrected with it by the tax authority.

If you help run one of these organisations

The reader's side of this is a tick box. The entity's side is an application, and it is the reason a group you would expect to find on the list sometimes is not.

For the religious and environmental routes the law is explicit that the body has to have requested the tax benefit: Article 32 of the Religious Freedom Law says the church or religious community must have applied for it, and Article 14 of Lei n.º 35/98 says the same of an environmental body. Being a worthy organisation with public utility status is not enough on its own. Somebody has to file.

For youth and student associations, Portaria n.º 798/2022 sets out the procedure in full. The association writes to the IPDJ, proves its recognition under Lei n.º 23/2006 and asks to be registered as eligible, and it has to do so by 30 September of the fiscal year whose tax it hopes to receive. It also has to meet the ordinance's conditions on recognition and its effects, not merely hold the label.

Once accepted, an association that benefited in the immediately preceding year does not have to reapply, unless the benefit is interrupted because one of the legal conditions stopped being met. If that happens, it goes back into the queue and applies again by the same 30 September deadline. And an association that knows it no longer meets the conditions has a duty to say so: it must tell the IPDJ by 30 September of the year concerned.

Whichever route applies, the deadline that matters to donors is the publication of the list, which Article 152 pins to the first day of the annual filing window. An entity accepted after that point is not on the form taxpayers are looking at.

Three practical points

Filing on time is part of the gift. The 31 March transfer deadline applies to tax assessed on declarations filed within the legal window. Late filing moves your money out of that cycle.

Register in advance if you can. The end-of-March route on the Portal costs nothing, carries across automatically into the declaration, and holds even if you end up not filing at all.

Do not confuse this with a tax deduction for donations. The consignação is not a donation you are making with your own money and claiming relief on. It is an instruction about where a slice of tax you already owe should land. The cultural patronage regime, which the government widened in 2026, is a different animal and mostly a corporate one. If you want to give your own money or your own time as well, our guide to volunteering and giving in Portugal is the place to start.

Sources

This guide is written from official Portuguese and EU sources.

• Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Portal das Finanças, Consignação de IRS e IVA (Portuguese only)
• Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Portal das Finanças, Código do IRS, Artigo 152.º, Consignação a favor de instituições culturais com estatuto de utilidade pública (Portuguese only)
• Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Portal das Finanças, Código do IRS, Artigo 153.º, Consignações em sede de IRS (Portuguese only)
• Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Portal das Finanças, Código do IRS, Artigo 78.º-F, Dedução pela exigência de fatura (Portuguese only)
• Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Portal das Finanças, Lei n.º 42/2024, de 14 de novembro, que aumenta para 1 por cento a consignação de receita de IRS (PDF, Portuguese only)
• Diário da República, Portaria n.º 798/2022, de 17 de novembro, que regulamenta a consignação de 0,5 por cento do IRS a associações juvenis, de caráter juvenil ou de estudantes (Portuguese only)
• Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Portal das Finanças, Benefício fiscal da consignação de quota do IRS, listagem de entidades com processo deferido por ano fiscal (Portuguese only)