Five Days Out — How Portugal's Expanded 'Direito ao Esquecimento' Reshapes the Mortgage and Insurance Form on 2 May

On Saturday, 2 May 2026, a piece of legislation that has been ten years in the political queue finally lands on the desks of Portuguese banks and insurers. President António José Seguro promulgated the diploma on 22 April, and after publication in the Diário da República it sits in a five-day countdown that ends with the most consequential redrafting of the medical-history questionnaire Portuguese consumers have ever seen.

The headline change is the patient list. The 2021 framework law, until now operationalised only by Decree-Law 79/2026 of 17 March, covered a narrow set of oncological conditions after a ten-year clean window. The diploma signed on 22 April widens the scope in two directions at once. It pulls the cancer cure-and-silence interval down — five years for adult cancers diagnosed before age 21, ten years otherwise — and it explicitly admits three new disease categories that previous drafts had left out: people living with HIV under controlled viral load, patients who have completed hepatitis C therapy with sustained virological response, and diabetics whose glycaemic profile sits within parameters the Direção-Geral da Saúde will publish as a portaria.

What the law does, mechanically, is forbid lenders and insurers from asking — and forbid applicants from being penalised by — health information falling outside the permitted window. The scope is narrow but financially central: crédito à habitação, crédito ao consumo, and the credit-life and disability insurance policies that banks bundle on top of those mortgages. Workplace relationships, group health policies and private supplementary insurance not tied to credit remain governed by the general regime; the Liga Portuguesa Contra o Cancro and APDP have flagged this as the next legislative front.

What the form looks like on 2 May

The Bank of Portugal and ASF, the insurance regulator, have circulated draft minimum-content templates to retail banks for the redesigned saúde questionnaire. From Saturday, the form must (i) state in bold that the applicant is not required to declare conditions covered by the right-to-be-forgotten regime, (ii) list the four protected categories, (iii) flag the time intervals, and (iv) provide a complaint channel direct to the Comissão de Acompanhamento.

Insurers retain the ability to apply sobreprémios or exclusions for pathologies outside the regime, and the regime does not create an automatic right to a contract — banks may still refuse credit on standard solvency grounds. What it removes is the long shadow that a 2010 leukaemia, a 2014 HIV diagnosis or a long-controlled type-2 diabetes have been casting over mortgage applications a decade later.

The supervisory architecture

The diploma lays out a tripartite oversight machine. The Comissão de Acompanhamento at the Ministry of Health collects complaints and publishes annual statistics. ASF supervises insurers' compliance and can sanction at the contract level. The Bank of Portugal does the same for credit institutions under its conduct-supervision mandate that Álvaro Santos Pereira's office has been visibly building out. Decree-Law 79/2026 set fines of up to €44,891 for personal infractions and €5.32 million for institutional ones — penalties that move this from soft-law into a regime banks will need their compliance teams to police from Friday afternoon onward.

For Portugal's roughly 850,000 mortgage-active households, plus the consumer-credit perimeter, the practical effect is straightforward. From the May Day weekend, the standard branch interview no longer asks if the applicant has ever had a malignancy, an HIV diagnosis, treated hepatitis C, or diabetes within the protected windows — and any sobreprémio quoted on those grounds becomes legally challengeable. After ten years on the legislative shelf, the lei deixa de ser uma boa intenção e passa a ser um formulário.

The Portugal Brief’s reporting on getting a NIF as a new arrival in Portugal sits alongside this piece.