Monday Is the Last Day to Pay Your IRS, and the Last Day the State Has to Pay You
About 6.4 million returns were filed and 2.3 million refunds paid by early July, with roughly 200 million euros still to go out. Refunds are smaller this year because less was withheld monthly. If you cannot pay, the instalment request closes on 15 September.
Monday is the last day of the 2026 IRS campaign, and the deadline runs in both directions. Taxpayers whose settlement produced a bill have until the end of today to pay it. The state has until the end of today to finish paying out the refunds it owes.
The campaign opened on 1 April. By early July the Autoridade Tributaria had received about 6.4 million returns and paid more than 2.3 million refunds. Roughly 200 million euros of refunds were still outstanding at that point, which is the sum the tax office is contractually racing to clear before midnight.
Smaller refunds, and more bills
Deco Proteste expects refunds to be lower this year, and in some cases to flip into an additional payment. The mechanism is simple and worth understanding if the number on your settlement surprised you. Withholding tables were adjusted so that less was deducted from monthly salaries and pensions across the year. More money arrived in your account each month, which means less was sitting with the state waiting to come back. A smaller refund is not a larger tax bill; it is the same annual liability collected on a different schedule.
That distinction matters most to households that budget around the August refund as a de facto thirteenth payment. If your refund arrived thinner than usual, the cash has already been paid to you in twelve instalments.
If you cannot pay today
Missing the deadline does not immediately trigger enforcement, but it does start a clock. The route out is a payment plan requested electronically on the Portal das Financas, and the request must be filed within 15 days of the end of the voluntary payment period, which puts the practical cut-off at 15 September. Instalments carry juros de mora, charged at the annual rate published for debts to the state in 2026, 7.221 percent, running from the end of the voluntary period to the month each instalment is settled.
Ignore it entirely and the sequence is a certidao de divida followed by an execucao fiscal, at which point the debt attracts collection costs and the tax office can move against bank accounts and wages. Miss one instalment of an agreed plan and the remaining instalments can fall due at once.
If the state is late paying you
Refunds delivered after the legal deadline entitle the taxpayer to juros indemnizatorios, interest owed by the state for holding money it should have returned. In practice the vast majority of refunds land well before the deadline, and the ones that slip are usually flagged returns awaiting verification rather than administrative drift.
What this means for expats
- Check the settlement, not just the refund: the demonstracao de liquidacao on the Portal das Financas shows how the figure was reached, and our guide to contesting an assessment sets out the reclamacao graciosa route if it is wrong.
- Next year starts in February: deductions depend on invoices validated on e-Fatura, and the February deadline is the one that actually determines your 2027 refund.
- The wider picture: we set out the timetable when the tax office closed this year's settlements in July.
- Beware the calls: the tax office has warned about telephone fraud using IRS refunds as the hook. It does not ring you asking for bank details.
