From October a Personal Loan for Education or Health May Not Legally Exceed 8.2 Percent, and the Used-Car Ceiling Moves the Other Way to 14.3

The Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal) set the ceilings on consumer borrowing for the final quarter of 2026 on Friday. From 1 October, a personal loan taken out for education, health, the energy transition or equipment leasing may not carry a global effective annual rate above 8.2 percent, down from 8.9 percent in the current quarter. Every other kind of personal loan, meaning home improvements, works, debt consolidation and general purposes, is capped at 15.0 percent, down 0.3 points from 15.3.

Car credit moves the other way in all four of its categories. A loan to buy a new car is capped at 11.2 percent, up 0.3 points. The leasing or long-term rental route on a new car is capped at 5.4 percent, also up 0.3. On used cars, the leasing route rises 0.1 points to 6.7 percent and the general category rises 0.2 points to 14.3 percent.

Credit cards, credit lines, current accounts and overdraft facilities stay where they were, at 18.5 percent. So does the maximum nominal annual rate on credit overruns, at 18.5 percent.

These ceilings are a rear-view mirror, not a lever

It is tempting to read a falling cap as the supervisor getting tougher. It is not. The arithmetic is fixed in law, in article 28 of Decreto-Lei n.º 133/2009 de 2 de junho, the decree that transposed the EU consumer credit directive and that carries the blunt heading "Usura" (Usury).

Under that article a credit contract is usurious if its global effective annual rate exceeds, by one quarter, the average rate lenders actually charged in the previous quarter for that type of contract. A second test catches anything exceeding by 50 percent the average across all consumer credit signed in the previous quarter. The supervisor's job is to identify the contract types, run the calculations and publish the result quarterly.

So Friday's number measures the third quarter rather than deciding the fourth. The education and health ceiling fell 0.7 points because lenders charged less over the summer. The used-car ceiling rose because they charged more. Nobody at the Bank chose either direction.

What happens if a lender goes over

This is the part of the regime that borrowers rarely hear about, and it is unusually sharp. Article 28 does not simply void the excess or trim the rate back to the ceiling. Paragraph 6 provides that a rate above the limit is automatically reduced to half the maximum, "without prejudice to any criminal liability". A lender that prices a used-car loan at 15 percent next quarter does not end up collecting 14.3. It ends up collecting 7.15.

Paragraph 7 sets the other boundary: the article does not reach contracts already signed or in force. A quarterly ceiling applies to what you sign in that quarter. It does not retroactively cheapen a loan agreed in June.

A ceiling is not an offer

The practical value of the table is as a boundary check rather than a shopping guide. Nothing obliges a bank to lend anywhere near these rates, and the spread inside the list is the real lesson: the same borrower, in the same quarter, faces a legal maximum of 5.4 percent to lease a new car and 18.5 percent on a credit card. Thirteen points separate two ways of financing the same purchase.

These usury ceilings also sit alongside, and work differently from, the affordability rules the supervisor brought in on 1 August, which cap total loan repayments at 45 percent of a borrower's net income. Those limit how much you may borrow. These limit what you may be charged for it. Clearing one says nothing about clearing the other.