Expropriation in Portugal in 2026: A Practical Guide to the Offer That Comes Before the State Takes Your Land, the 20 Days You Have to Answer, and the Municipal Assembly Vote Added in August

A letter arrives by registered post. It names your property, cites a law you have never heard of, and encloses an offer to buy it. It is not from an estate agent, and saying no does not end the matter. This is the opening move of an expropriação por utilidade pública (expropriation for public utility), and it is running right now against hundreds of landowners in the Aveiro district as the first section of Portugal's high-speed railway moves to construction.

Expropriation is not rare, and it is not confined to megaprojects. Road widening, a new school, a flood-defence scheme, a municipal car park and a water main can all produce one. The rules are set out in the Código das Expropriações (Expropriations Code), approved by Lei n.º 168/99, de 18 de setembro, which was amended for the fifth time on 4 August 2026. That amendment changed who signs the order when the project is a municipal one, and it took effect on 9 August 2026.

This guide sets out what the state must do before it can take your land, the deadlines that bind you, how the money is worked out, what you can do if the figure is wrong, when you can get the land back, and what the tax office expects afterwards.

The constitutional floor

Article 62 of the Constituição da República Portuguesa (Constitution of the Portuguese Republic) does two things in two short paragraphs. It guarantees everyone the right to private property and to pass it on in life or on death. Then it says that requisition and expropriation for public utility "may only be carried out on the basis of law and on payment of fair compensation".

The Código das Expropriações is that law. Its first article allows immovable property and the rights inherent to it to be expropriated for a public-utility cause falling within the expropriating body's remit, purposes or object, against contemporaneous payment of fair compensation. Its second article binds the expropriating body and everyone else involved to the principles of legality, justice, equality, proportionality, impartiality and good faith.

Two limits follow from that. The expropriation must be confined to what is necessary for its purpose, although it may allow for future needs under a phased and calendared programme that cannot exceed six years. And nationality is not a filter: the Code speaks of owners and interested parties, not of Portuguese citizens. If you hold property here, these rules protect you on exactly the same terms as they protect your neighbour.

Step one: the resolução de expropriar

Before anything else, the body that wants your land must adopt a resolução de expropriar, a formal resolution to seek the declaration of public utility. Article 10 requires that resolution to be reasoned and to state, expressly and clearly:

• the public-utility cause being pursued and the legal rule that permits it;
• the assets to be expropriated, and the owners and other known interested parties;
• a forecast of the costs the expropriation will involve;
• what the applicable territorial management instrument provides for the property and for the area around it.

The parcels have to be identified precisely, either by their conservatória (land registry) descriptions and registrations and their matriz (tax register) inscriptions, or by a parcel plan giving the coordinates of the points that define the boundaries, referenced to the geodetic network, at a scale of at least 1:1000 inside urban perimeters and 1:2000 outside them. If you have never checked how your property appears in those two registers, this is the moment it matters. Our guides to the caderneta predial and to registering rural land on BUPi cover both.

The cost forecast is not a guess. It must be based on a prior valuation, documented by a report, carried out by a perito (expert) from the official list, freely chosen by the body that wants the land. That number then follows the whole process: it is the reference for the first offer, and it is the sum that has to be deposited before anyone takes possession.

The resolution is notified to you, and to any other interested party whose address is known, by registered letter or official communication with acknowledgement of receipt.

Step two: the offer, and the 20 days

Article 11 obliges the interested body to try to buy the property by ordinary private-law agreement before it asks for a declaration of public utility. There are two exceptions: cases attributed urgency under article 15, and cases where private acquisition is legally or materially impossible.

The notification described above must therefore include a purchase proposal, taking as its reference the value in the expert's report. You then have 20 days from receiving the proposal to say what you wish about it. Your counterproposal may be founded on a valuation documented by a report from a perito of your own choosing. That is the single most useful sentence in the Code for an owner, and the one most often left unused: at the very first stage, before any court is involved, the law expressly contemplates you commissioning your own expert and arguing from their number rather than theirs.

Where the owners are unknown or the letters come back undelivered, the offer is publicised instead by notices posted in the municipality and the freguesias concerned and in two consecutive issues of two of the most-read newspapers in the region, one of them national. In that case the reply period is 30 days from the last newspaper publication.

Refusing, failing to reply within the period, or making a counterproposal the other side is not interested in all have the same effect: the body may go straight to requesting the declaration of public utility. Silence buys you nothing. One small advantage of agreeing at this stage is that a private-law purchase can go ahead even where the parcel, or what is left of your land, is smaller than the unidade de cultura, the minimum agricultural plot size that would otherwise block a division.

Step three: the declaration of public utility, and who signs it

The declaração de utilidade pública (DUP, declaration of public utility) is the act that makes the expropriation real. It must be reasoned. It is published by extract in the 2nd series of the Diário da República, notified to you by registered post, and annotated on the land registry. The expropriating body must also publicise it by a notice affixed at the main entrance of the building, where there is one.

Who signs the DUP depends on who wants the land, and this is the part that changed in August 2026. The general rule in article 14 is that the competent authority is the minister whose department has final appraisal of the process. Decreto-Lei n.º 160/2026, de 4 de agosto, passed under a legislative authorisation in Lei n.º 25/2026, de 1 de junho, rewrote that article so that:

• for expropriations initiated by local government, including urgent ones, the competence now belongs to the assembleia municipal (municipal assembly), on a reasoned proposal from the câmara municipal (municipal council);
• where the expropriation crosses the boundaries of two or more municipalities, every municipal assembly concerned must deliberate, each on a reasoned proposal from its own câmara;
• the deliberation must be taken by a majority of the members in effective functions, not merely of those present;
• in the cross-boundary case, the public utility is treated as declared on the date of the last legally required deliberation;
• the deliberation is communicated to the government member responsible for local administration for information only, without prejudice to statutory inspection powers.

The government's stated reason, set out in the decree's preamble, is decentralisation: bringing the decision closer to the territory it affects. For an owner the practical consequence is different and more useful. A municipal expropriation now has to pass through a public deliberative body whose sessions are open and whose members are elected by ward, rather than through a ministerial signature in Lisbon. That is a point at which objection is possible, and our guide to taking part in public consultations covers how to use that kind of opening.

Business-initiated cases are unchanged: recognition of the public interest requested by companies, and the expropriation of land needed to install, expand, reorganise or reconvert their industrial units or accesses, remains with the relevant minister. Where no department can be identified, competence falls to the Prime Minister, who may delegate it to the minister responsible for spatial planning.

The clocks the DUP starts

The DUP is not open-ended. Under article 13, it lapses if the arbitration is not set up within one year, or if the expropriation process is not sent to the competent court within 18 months, both counted from publication. You, or any other interested party, can ask for the lapse to be declared, either by the court that would hear an appeal from the arbitral decision or by the body that made the declaration.

A lapsed DUP can be renewed in duly reasoned cases, within a maximum of one year from the end of those periods. If it is renewed, you are notified and may choose between having a fresh compensation figure set or having the old one updated. There is an important exception for what the Code calls an obra contínua, a continuous work: a linearly configured project capable of phased execution, which is precisely what a railway or a motorway is. For those, once construction has started anywhere along the alignment, the lapse can no longer be invoked, unless the works are suspended or interrupted for more than three years.

There is also a separate duty on you. Article 17-A requires you, after the DUP is notified, to tell the expropriating body in writing of any change of habitual residence or registered office. If you do not, the failure to reach you is not a ground for repeating any step of the process. In a procedure conducted almost entirely by registered post, that is a trap worth avoiding.

Urgency, and losing possession before the price is set

The DUP may itself attribute urgency to the expropriation, for works of public interest. The attribution must always be reasoned, and its effect is immediate: the expropriating body gets posse administrativa (administrative possession) of the land straight away. Urgency lapses if works on the parcel do not start within the period fixed in the works programme, absent a properly justified reason.

A separate and more extreme category exists. Article 16 allows expropriação urgentíssima where the need arises from public calamity or the requirements of internal security or national defence. There, the State or the authorities it designates may take immediate administrative possession with no prior formality at all, and the compensation is then settled through the litigious process.

In the ordinary case, administrative possession cannot happen until three things have been done. The DUP and the possession authorisation must have been notified. The sum from the expert's report must have been deposited at a bank in the expropriating body's home area, to the order of the owner and the other interested parties, unless they are unknown or title is in doubt. And a vistoria ad perpetuam rei memoriam must have been carried out.

That survey is your evidentiary safety net, and it is worth attending. Its purpose is to fix, before the diggers arrive, the facts that will otherwise disappear. The expert is named by the president of the Tribunal da Relação (Court of Appeal) from the official list, at the expropriating body's request. You must be notified at least five working days in advance. You may attend, and you may put written questions which the expert is obliged to answer in the report. The record has to contain a detailed description of the site, including the buildings on it, their characteristics, the period of construction and their state of repair; express mention of every element capable of influencing the valuation; and plans, photographs or other images of the property and its surroundings. The expert has 15 days to deliver the report, extendable to 30 in justified cases.

Two further points on possession. The notification must state the place, day and hour of the handover, which takes place on the land itself. If you have been properly notified and simply do not turn up, possession is conferred anyway. And where the expropriation is urgent, the prior deposit is waived, but it must then be made within 10 days of possession; if it is late, you are owed moratory interest on it.

What "fair compensation" actually measures

Article 23 is unusually clear about what the money is for. Fair compensation is not meant to share out the benefit the expropriating body gains. It is meant to make good the loss you suffer, corresponding to the real and current value of the property according to its effective or possible use in a normal economic use, at the date the DUP is published, taking account of the circumstances and facts existing at that date.

Four uplifts are expressly excluded from the valuation:

• any increase in value produced by the declaration of public utility itself;
• any increase from public works or developments completed less than five years earlier, where no betterment charge was settled, and to the extent of that charge;
• voluptuary or useful improvements made after the resolution was notified to you;
• viability information, licences or administrative authorisations applied for after that notification.

The Code also directs that no factor, circumstance or situation created for the purpose of increasing the compensation may be taken into account. The practical translation is that planting an orchard, applying for a building permit or laying a driveway the week after the letter arrives will not raise the price.

Cutting the other way, article 23(5) allows both sides, and the court of its own motion, to ask for criteria other than the Code's standard formulas where those formulas do not produce the asset's real and current value in a normal market situation. And article 23(6) provides that the State guarantees payment of the fair compensation, with a right of recourse against the expropriating body afterwards. If the body that took your land runs out of money, the State stands behind the debt.

How the number is built

The amount is calculated by reference to the date of the DUP and then updated to the date of the final decision using the consumer price index excluding housing, as published by INE for the place where the property is.

Land is first classified into one of two categories. It is solo apto para construção, land fit for building, if it has road access plus water, electricity and sewerage networks adequate to serve the buildings on it or to be built; or if it has only some of those but sits within an existing urban core; or if a territorial management instrument destines it to acquire those characteristics; or if it holds a subdivision permit or building licence in force at the date of the DUP, provided that process began before the resolution was notified. Everything else is solo para outros fins, land for other purposes. That distinction is where most of the money is, and it is why the licensing status of a plot is worth understanding before, not after, a letter arrives.

For both categories the primary method is comparative: an updated arithmetic mean of unit prices from acquisitions, or from tax valuations correcting declared values, in the same freguesia and neighbouring freguesias, over the three years with the highest annual average out of the last five, for properties with comparable characteristics, adjusted for the parameters set in the planning instrument. For building land the result may then be corrected for the urban surroundings by up to 10 percent. The Finance Ministry's services are obliged to supply the list of transactions and tax valuations in the area on request.

Where that cannot be done for lack of data, building land is valued from construction cost instead, using the administratively fixed figures for controlled-cost housing as a reference. In a normal economic use, the land is then worth a maximum of 15 percent of the construction cost, varying with location, environmental quality and local facilities, with defined additions for infrastructure: up to 1.5 percent for paved road access alongside the plot, up to 0.5 percent for pavements along the whole street frontage on the plot's side, and so on for the other networks. Land for other purposes, where the comparison fails, is valued by reference to its actual or possible income in its existing state at the DUP date, the nature of the soil and subsoil, the terrain, access, the predominant crops and the region's climate, hanging fruit and other objective circumstances.

Buildings are valued on their own list of elements: construction value at updated cost, location, surroundings and age; infrastructure, public transport and proximity to facilities; architectural quality, comfort and state of repair, including floors, roofs, external walls, common parts, doors and windows; gross area; the price and dates of previous purchases; the number of tenants and the rents; the value of comparable nearby properties; and declarations made to the tax authorities.

When only part of your land is taken

This is the situation most owners near a linear project actually face, and the Code handles it in two places.

Article 3 lets you turn a partial expropriation into a total one. You may require the whole property to be taken if the remaining part does not proportionally provide the same amenities the whole property offered, or if the amenities the remainder provides have no economic interest to you, determined objectively. The same right extends to a part of your land outside the DUP where either of those tests is met.

Article 29 governs the arithmetic if you do not go that route. The arbitrators or experts must always calculate separately the total value and income of the whole property and of the parts inside and outside the declaration. Where the remainder is depreciated by the division, or where other losses or costs follow, including a reduction in the total buildable area or the cost of rebuilding fences to match those demolished or left standing, those amounts are itemised separately and added to the value of the part actually taken. A severed plot with no road frontage is a smaller plot and a worse one, and the Code says so.

If what is being created over your land is an administrative easement rather than an outright taking, article 8 gives a right to compensation in three cases: where the easement makes the use you were making of the property unviable, considered as a whole; where the property was not in use and the easement makes any use of it unviable; or where it completely annuls the property's economic value. Private easements between neighbours follow a different regime, covered in our guide to rights of way.

Tenants and businesses are not bystanders

The Code's definition of interested parties is wider than the owner. It includes holders of any real right or charge over the property, and the tenants of rural or urban properties.

Residential tenants sit in a special position. A residential tenant of an urban property is only an interested party in that capacity if they give up equivalent rehousing, suited to their needs and to those of the people living with them in a shared household at the date of the DUP. In other words the default is rehousing, and compensation is the alternative you elect. A residential tenant obliged to leave because the lease lapses may choose between a dwelling whose characteristics, notably location and rent, are similar to the old one, or a single payment. Where the payment is chosen, the calculation looks at the value of the dwelling, the value of improvements the tenant made, and the relationship between the rent they were paying and market rents. The rehousing route is not theoretical: it is what Porto has been weighing for the households in the high-speed line's path at Campanhã.

Commercial, industrial and liberal-profession leases, and rural leases, are treated as autonomous charges for compensation purposes. For a business lease the reckoning covers the costs of the new premises, including the rent differential the tenant will now pay, and the losses from the period of shutdown objectively needed to move. For a rural lease it covers hanging fruit or ruined harvests, the value of improvements the tenant is entitled to, and the other losses flowing from the end of the tenancy.

If you own the property and run a business on it yourself, article 31 adds the same head of loss on top of the property's value: the losses from the unavoidable cessation, or the interruption and transfer, of that activity for the objectively necessary period. Where a farm as a whole is damaged by the taking, the losses to the wider holding are added too.

If you do not accept the figure

The sequence from here is fixed, and the deadlines are short.

1. The formal offer. Within 15 days of the DUP being published, the expropriating body must send you a compensation proposal by registered post.
2. Your reply: 15 days. You may found a counterproposal on a report by an expert of your own choosing. If you do not reply, or the body is not interested in your counterproposal, it starts the litigious phase. Separately, you must answer any written questions the body puts to you within eight days.
3. Arbitration. Failing agreement, the compensation is fixed by three arbitrators, designated by the president of the Tribunal da Relação for the area from the official list of experts, with one named to preside. Their reasoned decision is taken by majority; where there is neither unanimity nor a majority, the arithmetic mean of the two closest opinions applies, or the middle one where the gaps are equal. They have 30 days to deliver, extendable to 60 in justified cases. Their fees are paid by the expropriating body, which is excused from paying any arbitrator who misses the deadline without justification.
4. Appeal: 20 days. An appeal always lies from the arbitral decision, with merely devolutive effect, to the court of the place where the property is. The expropriating body must send the file to that court within 30 days of receiving the arbitral decision, together with a deposit slip for the arbitrated sum; if it is late, it deposits moratory interest as well.
5. The court valuation. On appeal the valuation is done by five experts: each side names one, and the court names the other three from the official list. Decisions on appeals from the arbitral decision are to be given within 30 days of the deadline for submissions.
6. The end of the road. There is no appeal to the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça (Supreme Court of Justice) from the Court of Appeal's ruling fixing the compensation.

One detail is worth knowing before you decide whether to appeal. Where you do appeal, the judge immediately releases to you the part of the compensation that is not in dispute. And you may then ask, within 10 days, to be given the disputed part as well, against a bank guarantee or seguro-caução for the same amount. Appealing does not mean waiting years with nothing.

Getting paid

The default is money, paid in one go. Instalments, interest arrangements, payment by the transfer of other assets and total expropriation can all be agreed in an amicable expropriation, but instalments are capped at a maximum of three years, sums outstanding bear interest, and instalments still to fall due are automatically updated for the consumer price index excluding housing.

Delay is compensable in its own right. Article 70 gives owners and other interested parties the right to be indemnified for delays attributable to the expropriating body, whether in the procedure, in the court process, or in making any deposit, with moratory interest at the Civil Code rate running on the final compensation or on the deposits.

Once the decision fixing the compensation is final, the first-instance judge orders the expropriating body to deposit what it owes within 10 days, together with an itemised note showing the calculation. You are notified of the amount and the note, and you may withdraw the money without giving up the right to challenge it. If the deposit is not made, the judge orders payment out of the guarantees the body has provided, and if a shortfall remains, notifies the service responsible for State guarantees to deposit the missing amount in the body's place.

Getting the land back

The direito de reversão (right of reversion) is the Code's answer to land taken and then not used. It arises in two situations: if within two years of the adjudication the expropriated assets are not applied to the purpose that justified the expropriation, or if the purposes of the expropriation have ceased in the meantime.

There are hard limits. Reversion must be requested within three years of the event that gave rise to it, or it lapses. It ceases altogether 20 years after the adjudication; or where the assets are given a different purpose under a new declaration of public utility; or where you renounce it; or where the declaration is renewed on grounds of serious harm to the public interest, within a year of the triggering facts. If the three-year window closes, you keep something smaller in its place: a right of preference on the first sale of the property, up to the 20-year limit. And if the expropriating body wants to sell off surplus parcels, it must notify you of the proposed sale by registered post at least 60 days beforehand; silence after that period counts as renunciation.

The continuous-work rule reappears here, and it bites. Where a continuous work requires the expropriation of separate properties, starting construction at any point on the alignment extinguishes the right of reversion over all of them. For a railway, that is a single date after which the land is gone for good.

Procedurally, reversion is requested from the body that declared the public utility, or whoever has succeeded to that competence. If you are not notified of a favourable decision within 90 days of the request, you have one year to bring an ação administrativa comum in the administrative court for the area, combining the reversion claim with a claim for adjudication. Where reversion is authorised and agreed, the agreement takes the form of an auto de reversão, must be formalised within 90 days of notification of the authorisation, and is sufficient title for the tax inscription, the detachment and the land registry entry.

A related provision covers the opposite case. Under article 88 the expropriating body may withdraw from the expropriation, wholly or partly, for as long as it has not been invested in ownership. You are then compensated under the general law, with the expropriation treated as having begun when the declaration was published in the Diário da República. If the withdrawal comes after the body has already taken possession, the parties may by joint application convert the litigious process into a reversion process.

What the tax office expects

Compensation for expropriation is not tax-free income that arrives quietly.

The Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira (AT, Tax and Customs Authority) treats an expropriation as an onerous transfer of real rights capable of generating a capital gain. The resulting gains are category G income and must be declared in Anexo G of the Modelo 3 IRS return, unless they are business, professional, investment or property income. Where the transitional non-taxation regime in article 5 of Decreto-Lei n.º 442-A/88, de 30 de novembro, applies, which is the rule that keeps pre-1989 acquisitions outside the capital-gains net, the declaration goes in Anexo G1 instead.

The figure you enter is set by article 44 of the Código do IRS (Personal Income Tax Code): in the case of expropriation, the valor de realização (realisation value) is the amount of the compensation.

You do not get to forget about it either. Article 97 of the Expropriations Code obliges the expropriating body to report the value attributed to the property, whether in the amicable deed or in the final decision of the litigious process, to the competent tax office and to INE.

A practical checklist

1. Open the registered letter and diary the date. Almost every deadline in this Code runs from a notification, and non-judicial periods are counted under articles 72 and 73 of the Código do Procedimento Administrativo.
2. Read the resolution, not just the offer. It must name the public-utility cause, the enabling rule, the cost forecast and what the planning instrument says about your land. Those four things are where a defective expropriation shows itself.
3. Commission your own expert inside the 20 days. The Code expressly invites it, and the first offer is anchored to a valuation the other side paid for.
4. Check the land classification. Whether your plot is treated as fit for building or for other purposes is usually the single biggest variable in the figure.
5. If only part is taken, do the arithmetic on the remainder. Consider whether to demand total expropriation, and make sure the depreciation of what is left, and the cost of new fencing, are itemised.
6. Attend the vistoria ad perpetuam rei memoriam and put your questions in writing. Once the site is cleared, the record is all that is left of what was there.
7. Tell them if you move. Failing to notify a change of address will not win you a second chance at any step.
8. Keep the file after payment. You will need it for Anexo G, and the reversion clock runs for years afterwards.

Nothing here is legal advice, and a contested expropriation is a matter for a lawyer with the file in front of them. But the deadlines above are short, they start without warning, and most of the leverage an owner has sits in the first month.

Sources

This guide is written from official Portuguese and EU sources.

• Diário da República, Código das Expropriações, approved by Lei n.º 168/99, de 18 de setembro, consolidated text as amended to Decreto-Lei n.º 160/2026 (Portuguese only)
• Diário da República, Decreto-Lei n.º 160/2026, de 4 de agosto, fifth amendment to the Código das Expropriações, in force from 9 August 2026 (Portuguese only)
• Assembleia da República, Constituição da República Portuguesa, Artigo 62.º, direito de propriedade privada (Portuguese only)
• Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Código do IRS, Artigo 44.º, valor de realização (Portuguese only)
• Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Questões frequentes, IRS, mais-valias: question 5868 on the declaration obligation following an expropriation (Portuguese only)