IHRU Demands a 12-Month Lease for Porta 65 Jovem — But the Law Says No Such Thing, and Lawyers Tell Público the Institute Is Blocking Eligible Renters Without Legal Basis

Portugal's Habitação Institute — the Instituto da Habitação e da Reabilitação Urbana (IHRU) — is blocking applications to the Porta 65 Jovem young-tenant rental subsidy on the basis of a requirement that does not appear anywhere in the law. The story landed in Público over the weekend, with jurists consulted by the paper saying that the institute has imposed a minimum contract length of its own creation, has no statutory basis to do so, and has been filtering out otherwise eligible applicants on that ground.

What the IHRU is actually demanding

The contested rule says that the rental contract submitted by an applicant must have an active period of validity, at minimum, equal to the duration of the support — 12 months — counting from the first month in which the subsidy is awarded. In practice, that means an applicant who signs a 12-month contract at the start of January is fine; the same applicant signing a contract in November that runs until next October is not, because the IHRU treats the support window as starting from approval, not from signature.

The institute's reasoning, as reported in the paper, is administrative rather than legal: the apoio is designed to be granted in 12-month tranches, so the institute argues that the contract underpinning the rent has to last at least as long as the State's commitment. That logic feels intuitive. The legal problem is that the regulation governing Porta 65 Jovem — the diploma the IHRU is supposed to be applying — says nothing of the sort.

What the law actually says

Lawyers consulted by Público are explicit: the legislation does not impose any minimum duration on the rental contract that an applicant has to present. The eligibility rules cover age (18 to 35, with a single 36-year-old allowed in a couple where the other partner is at most 35), permanent-residence status, income ceilings tied to the minimum wage (the household's monthly corrected income cannot exceed four times the minimum wage, which sits at €920 for 2026, capping the threshold at €3,680/month), and a rent ceiling proportional to gross household monthly income. The contract has to be a valid arrendamento for permanent residence. Beyond that, no clock is set on the contract's remaining duration.

The implication is that the IHRU has effectively layered a requirement on top of the diploma without statutory cover — a requirement that, depending on how strictly the institute applies it during a given month, can be the difference between an applicant being admitted to the programme or rejected at the gate.

Why this hits real renters

Portugal's rental market is dominated by contracts at or near the legal minimum — one year, with automatic renewal, under the NRAU framework. Many landlords issue 12-month contracts with renewal clauses precisely because they want flexibility. Applicants for Porta 65 frequently submit existing contracts that they signed several months before the candidatura window opens. The IHRU's interpretation is that those contracts have to be still running for a full 12 months from the moment the subsidy award starts, which can fall a quarter or more after the application is filed.

The result, in practice, is that an otherwise eligible 28-year-old who signed a one-year lease in October — the standard academic-year and labour-market intake month — can find herself rejected when she applies in February, because by the time the IHRU finishes scoring the candidatura and approves the subsidy in May, the contract has only seven months left. The renewal clause exists; the law accepts it; the institute's administrative interpretation does not.

The size of the programme that is being filtered

Porta 65 Jovem is the State's flagship rental support for under-35 households — the income-tested counterpart to the youth-mortgage public guarantee that just had its envelope reinforced by another €750 million on Saturday's Diário da República. Last year the programme paid out support to more than 48,000 beneficiaries. The subsidy itself can reach roughly €325 per month for the highest-bracket couple at 50% of the rent, although the typical award sits closer to €200/month, renewable annually for up to five years.

That scale is what makes the IHRU's contested rule a meaningful filter rather than an edge-case glitch. With tens of thousands of households running through the candidatura system every year and the rental market structured around 12-month contracts that frequently sit mid-cycle when the application window opens, even a marginal rejection rate compounded across 12 months can deliver several thousand misclassified rejections.

The political side: a young-renter file the Government cannot afford to mishandle

The Government has spent the past two months piling young-renter and young-buyer measures on top of each other — the Joaquim Miranda Sarmento despacho that bumped the public mortgage guarantee to €2.3 billion, the IRS Jovem extension, the IMT exemption for first-home buyers under 35, the discussion around extending Porta 65 Jovem itself. The narrative is that the Executive is moving on the young-housing file. A story in Público on a Sunday saying that the agency tasked with delivering the headline rental support is rejecting candidates on a rule that does not exist in the law is the worst kind of administrative friction for an Executive selling decisive housing action.

The IHRU has not yet issued a public response. The expectation, if the institute's interpretation is genuinely without legal footing, is either an internal directive narrowing or removing the contract-duration requirement, or a decree-law amendment that retroactively writes the 12-month minimum into the diploma to bring the practice within the law. Either path leaves a population of rejected applicants with grounds to seek review of their candidaturas.

For renters under 35 sitting on a contract with less than 12 months of forward validity from the moment the support would notionally start, the practical advice is: file anyway, document the existence of the renewal clause and the length of the original contract, and keep the rejection letter. If the IHRU climbs down or is forced to climb down, those rejections are the first that will be reopened.