Government Files the Prestação Social Única (Single Social Benefit) Authorisation Request — 13 Existing Supports Merge Into an IAS-Indexed Payment With 24-Month Refusal Penalty

The Government lodged its legislative-authorisation request for the Prestação Social Única (PSU, Single Social Benefit) at the Assembleia da República (Parliament) on Monday 1 June, opening the parliamentary path for what would be the most consequential rewiring of Portugal's working-age welfare system in more than a decade. The package, signed off by Maria do Rosário Palma Ramalho's Ministério do Trabalho, Solidariedade e Segurança Social (Ministry of Labour, Solidarity and Social Security), was first reported by Público on Monday and detailed in further coverage on Tuesday 2 June.

The PSU is designed to absorb 13 of the existing means-tested supports for active-age households into a single payment, including the Rendimento Social de Inserção (RSI, Social Inclusion Income) and the subsídio social de desemprego (Social Unemployment Subsidy). The reference value will be set as a percentage of the Indexante dos Apoios Sociais (IAS, Social Support Index), currently €537 — a structural change from the earlier signalling that had pointed to the RSI value as the anchor.

Conditions tied to job-centre activation

Beneficiaries in active age will have to register at the Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional (IEFP, Employment and Vocational Training Institute) job centre, demonstrate availability to work or attend professional training and, where applicable, take part in social-solidarity activities. The activation rules do not apply to pensioners, students, informal carers, people with a disability of 80% or above, or claimants on certified sick leave.

The sharpest edge of the package is the sanction for refusing one of those offers. An unjustified refusal of a job, training or social-work proposal triggers the loss of the PSU for 24 months for the beneficiary directly involved. If a member of the household — rather than the headline claimant — is the one to refuse, that person is barred from the benefit for 12 months and is also excluded from the household calculation in any subsequent application, mechanically lowering the support the household could otherwise receive.

The social-solidarity activities themselves are capped at 15 hours per week and may not exceed eight hours a day. On a third renewal of the benefit, the weekly ceiling rises to 20 hours, a step the proposal frames as a way to deepen integration into the labour market over the life of the claim.

Parliamentary calendar and political backdrop

The Government's stated intention is to take the legislative-authorisation route — which would let it approve the implementing decree-law itself — and to have the new regime locked in before August. That timeline puts the PSU on a collision course with the summer break and with the laboural-reform package already moving through Parliament, where the Government recently secured approval of 50 amendments to the Código do Trabalho (Labour Code) while keeping its self-described “red lines” intact.

The political calculation is straightforward. By bundling 13 historically separate supports into one IAS-indexed payment with explicit activation duties, the Government can present a simplification narrative to centre-right voters while leaning on conditionality to defuse Chega's longstanding line of attack on the RSI. The trade-off is that the 24-month exclusion is one of the harshest sanctions in any EU active-labour-market scheme and will draw scrutiny from PS, BE and PCP benches that traditionally fought to keep RSI conditions narrowly defined.

For households currently drawing one or more of the 13 affected supports, the practical question is the transition. The Government has not yet published the conversion table that would translate today's RSI, subsídio social de desemprego and prestação social para a inclusão entitlements into PSU euros, but the IAS-anchored reference value of €537 — adjusted by household composition — is what claimants will be benchmarking against once the decree-law is approved.