DGES Lines Up 56,790 Public Higher-Education Seats for the 2026/27 Concurso Nacional — Medicine Adds 62 Places to 1,656 and Educação Básica Climbs 147 to 1,344 With Applications Opening on 20 July

The Direção-Geral do Ensino Superior (DGES, Directorate-General for Higher Education) has locked the headline numbers for the 2026/27 access cycle. The concurso nacional — Portugal's centralised admission round to public universities and polytechnics — opens with 56,790 places across the regime geral, with another 21,493 slots running through the special-access regimes and parallel competitions. Applications begin on Monday 20 July, the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior confirmed in last week's Diário da República publication.

Where the Places Sit

Of the regime-geral envelope, 34,841 places fall under university degrees and 21,949 under polytechnic licenciaturas. Together with the special-access slots, the public higher-education system carries a total of 78,283 seats in 2026/27, up 1,465 on the 2025/26 cycle. Universities absorb most of the headline expansion, but several polytechnics in the interior have added course-level capacity to back-fill the demand the Lisbon and Porto institutions cannot meet at the entrance cut-offs the system is pricing in.

Where the Numbers Move

• Medicine — 1,656 places (+62). The headline addition is a new licenciatura at Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) carrying 40 places, with the remaining 22 distributed across the existing six medical schools. The Minister of Health and the Minister of Education signed the protocol opening UTAD's medical degree in February.
• Educação Básica — 1,344 places (+147). The single largest expansion in absolute and relative terms. The increase tracks the Ministério da Educação's 2026 teacher-shortage signalling — see the parallel 4,776 entries into the permanent staff just confirmed for the 2026/27 academic year — and folds in dedicated capacity at the Lisboa, Porto, Coimbra and Bragança polytechnics.
• Course-level cap. Institutions can expand any single course's intake by no more than 5% over the previous year, a guardrail the Ministério da Ciência introduced in December 2025 to prevent unmoderated capacity stretches that were generating high dropout rates.

The Three-Phase Calendar

The cycle runs across three sequential phases, each closing the previous one's unfilled vacancies before opening the next.

• First phase — applications 20 July to 6 August, results 23 August, first-period enrolment 24-27 August.
• Second phase — applications 24 August to 2 September, results 13 September, enrolment by 17 September.
• Third phase — applications 22-24 September, results 30 September, enrolment by 2 October. The 21 September vacancy publication seeds the round with whatever capacity remains.

The complaints window opens 24-28 August. Students who use the Automatic IRS-style streamlined route remain inside the same Ensino Superior Online portal, which DGES upgraded for the cycle to handle a higher concurrent-session load after the 2025/26 portal stalled during the peak submission window.

What This Means for Applicants and Families

Two operational notes. First, the government revoked the minimum-entrance-exam requirement that the previous cycle introduced — a rule blamed for the 12% drop in placements last year. Roughly 1,300 courses will accept a single exam result this cycle. Second, the housing-strain story carries into 2026/27: a Lisbon or Porto placement at a non-residential course can still leave a student paying the same monthly rent as the maximum monthly maintenance grant covers, even with the Ação Social Escolar top-ups. Households with prospective applicants in either city should price the residential overhead before locking course preferences.

The DGES communiqué and the full course-by-course vacancy table land on the ensino superior portal on Monday 20 July, the same day the application window opens.