Diário da República Publishes Decreto-Lei 113/2026 on 8 June — Autonomous Driving Tests on Portuguese Roads Open From 8 July at a 0.2 g/l Operator Alcohol Cap, 20 km/h Speed Discount and Quadruple Liability Cover

The Diário da República published Decreto-Lei n.º 113/2026 on Monday, 8 June 2026, codifying the legal framework for licensing automated and autonomous vehicle (Sistemas Automáticos de Condução, or SAC) tests on Portuguese public roads. The diploma carries a 30-day vacatio legis, opening the trial window from 8 July 2026. The Council of Ministers (Conselho de Ministros) had approved the diploma at its 17 April 2026 meeting, after first floating the package in a January 2026 communication, and the President signed it through into the official gazette over the past week.

What the Diploma Permits

The regime authorises tests of three SAE levels of vehicle automation: conditional automation, high automation and full automation. Operators may run trials on state, regional and municipal public roads, as well as on private roads open to public traffic. There is no operational design domain (ODD) cap on the road network — the diploma's geographic perimeter is the whole licensed-road graph rather than a fenced testbed.

Administrative processing is fully dematerialised. Applications are submitted electronically and rest on a partial autocertification principle: rather than upfront inspections on every test, promoters file a sworn declaration committing to compliance with the technical and operational obligations set out in the diploma. The Autoridade Nacional de Segurança Rodoviária (ANSR — National Road Safety Authority) and the Instituto da Mobilidade e dos Transportes (IMT) carry the licence-review work alongside the proponent's self-declaration.

Foreign authorisations — autonomous-driving licences issued in other jurisdictions where the legal regime is functionally equivalent — are recognised within a maximum 45-day window, a key simplification for the international promoters the Government wants to attract.

Operator Hard Limits

The on-site driver or remote safety operator (the person who must be ready to take control at any moment) faces a stack of personal-qualification gates that go well beyond the ordinary Portuguese driving licence:

• Licence tenure: the operator must have held a valid category-B licence for at least six years.
• Clean record: no criminal or contraordenacional driving offences in the preceding five years.
• Alcohol limit: blood alcohol cannot exceed 0.2 g/l (grams per litre) — more than twice as strict as the 0.5 g/l ceiling the Código da Estrada (Road Code) applies to general drivers.
• Continuous-supervision cap: operators may not supervise the vehicle for more than three consecutive hours, with a mandatory rest of at least one hour before the next session.

Vehicle Hard Limits

Speed is the operational headline number. Posted road limits are reduced by 20 km/h for vehicles under test. On a road posted at 50 km/h the test ceiling drops to 30 km/h; on a 90 km/h regional road the ceiling becomes 70 km/h; on a 120 km/h auto-estrada the ceiling becomes 100 km/h. The 20 km/h discount is universal — there is no exception for closed roads or controlled-access stretches.

Every test vehicle must carry an event-data recorder that captures speed, braking and vehicle-infrastructure communications at a frequency of ten samples per second (10 Hz). Missing, corrupted or incomplete logs are themselves grounds for licence suspension.

Insurance and Sanctions

The diploma sets the minimum third-party liability insurance at the quadruple of the ordinary mandatory cover for motor vehicles in Portugal. With the 2026 mandatory minimum at €7.29 million for personal injury per accident, the test-vehicle floor rises to roughly €29 million per accident.

Contraordenação fines run from €250 to €40,000, with the Inspeção-Geral das Atividades em Saúde e Ambiente perimeter on operator-fitness fraud and the ANSR perimeter on road-safety breaches. The diploma also carves out a sanction track for SAC-vehicle data-capture failures — a single missing log file is a breach even without an actual road incident.

Why Lisbon Wants This Diploma Now

The Government's stated industrial-policy aim is to position Portugal as a European reference destination for SAC tests and to attract foreign investment into autonomous-mobility R&D. The Iberian peninsula's competitor jurisdictions — Spain has had a permit framework in place since 2015 (Instrucción 15/V-113) and a more substantial 2024 update on highly automated systems — and Portugal had been sitting outside the European testing perimeter. The diploma closes that gap with a regime explicitly designed to be lighter-touch on the paperwork side (autocertification, 45-day foreign-licence recognition) while heavier on the safety side (alcohol cap, speed discount, quadruple insurance, 10 Hz logging).

The diploma also frames an inclusion argument: SAC vehicles could expand mobility for elderly residents and people with disabilities who cannot drive themselves — a dimension the Ministério dos Direitos Sociais flagged during the consultation phase.

What This Means for Expats

• Road users from 8 July 2026: SAC-test vehicles may appear on any state, regional or municipal road. They will move 20 km/h below the posted limit, which means slow-moving traffic in regular lanes — drivers should expect to overtake. Mandatory marking conventions for SAC test vehicles will be set by ANSR regulation in the coming weeks.
• Tech-sector workers: the diploma is a direct invitation to international SAC promoters — Waymo, Cruise, Mobileye, Pony.ai, the autonomous-trucking startups — to set up Portuguese test programmes. Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve are the most likely beachheads (climate, road density, English-language workforce). The hiring ramp is a 12–24 month horizon, conditional on which promoters actually file applications.
• Insurance customers: the diploma does not affect ordinary motor insurance. Only operators of SAC tests carry the quadrupled liability cover; ordinary drivers remain on the standard mandatory minimum.
• Disability-mobility households: the inclusion narrative is real but the operational impact is years away. The diploma covers testing, not consumer-grade Level 4/5 deployment. Production autonomous transport in Portugal is unlikely before the late 2020s.
• Foreign-licence holders considering SAC operator work: the 45-day recognition window is generous on paper, but the six-year licence tenure has to be held on the equivalent foreign category-B licence. Holders should consult the IMT's coming implementing portaria before treating the recognition as automatic.

The next checkpoints are the ANSR vehicle-marking and operational-rule portaria (expected ahead of 8 July), the IMT licensing portal go-live and the first promoter applications. The diploma's three-year review clause is the structural backstop: any technical or safety failures inside the test window will feed back into a 2029 revision of the regime, well before consumer SAC deployment becomes a live regulatory question.