Government Pushes the Alojamento Local Municipal-Regulation Deadline Out to 31 December 2026 — Decree-Law Buys Concelhos Above the 1,000-Unit Threshold a Second Window to File Their Schemes

The Conselho de Ministros (Council of Ministers) approved on Thursday, 11 June, a decree-law that extends to 31 December 2026 the deadline by which municipalities with more than 1,000 registered Alojamento Local (Local Accommodation, AL) units must decide whether they want to draft a municipal regulation for the short-term-rental activity. The original deadline, written into the November 2023 Mais Habitação package, was due to expire mid-year and had become a procedural cliff for several câmaras that have not yet finalised their schemes.

The mechanism the original law set up was unusual. It created a default national regime — the country-wide rules that govern AL — and gave individual municipalities the option to overlay tighter local rules where the AL density was high enough to justify them. The 1,000-unit threshold was the trigger: any concelho above it had to formally decide whether it wanted a municipal regulation, even if the decision was to leave the national regime in place. The extension to 31 December 2026 keeps the trigger but stretches the decision window by roughly six months for a list of municipalities the Direcção-Geral das Autarquias Locais (Directorate-General for Local Authorities, DGAL) has been tracking quarter by quarter.

Lisbon, Porto, Cascais, Albufeira, Lagos, Portimão, Loulé, Sintra, Funchal, Faro and Aveiro all sit comfortably above the 1,000-unit threshold and have either already filed their schemes or are in late drafting. The municipalities the new deadline was actually written for are the second tier — concelhos that crossed the threshold during the 2024-2025 short-term-rental rebound and discovered they could not finalise a regulation inside the original window. The extension stops their AL stock from defaulting silently into the national regime by deadline pressure rather than by deliberate choice.

The political reading is straightforward. The current PSD/CDS-PP government has signalled it wants AL policy back in municipal hands and has already unwound several of the central-government clamps the previous PS executive layered onto the sector — including the contribuição extraordinária sobre o Alojamento Local (CEAL, extraordinary AL contribution) and the freeze on new registrations in inner-Lisbon and inner-Porto parishes. Buying the câmaras another six months is consistent with that frame: it lets each concelho calibrate its own response to its own AL pressure curve, without a national rule prescribing the answer.

The technical content of any municipal regulation is constrained. The câmara cannot expropriate an existing licence, cannot retroactively cap unit numbers below the December 2026 stock, and cannot withhold AL renewal without grounds the law enumerates. What it can do is set parish-by-parish density caps, raise the documentary bar on new registrations, condition renewals on building-condominium consent, and apply differentiated municipal fees. The variance across the country has already been wide: Lisbon’s draft is among the tightest in Europe; Albufeira’s is closer to a light-touch zoning overlay.

The market context behind the extension is that short-term-rental supply rebounded sharply across 2024 and 2025 after the post-pandemic wash-out. Idealista’s rental data has the underlying long-let rent in the major coastal concelhos rising fast enough that the political argument for tighter AL rules has structural traction — the assumption being that pulling units out of short-term and back into long-let inventory eases pressure. The empirical evidence for that lever is, generously, mixed. The DGAL is meanwhile compiling a comparative read of municipal regulations adopted so far, due in the autumn, which the government plans to use as a benchmarking layer when the new 31 December 2026 deadline runs out.

The decree-law publishes in the Diário da República (Republic Gazette) inside the standard 30-day window from Conselho de Ministros approval.

Sources: Público, ECO, Observador (11 June 2026).