A Risk Supplement Now Reaches Almost Every Desk at Portugal's Prison Service, and the Guards Are Written Out of It by Name

Two decree-laws published in Wednesday's Diário da República (Official Gazette) rebuild the careers of almost everyone who works for Portugal's prison and probation service, attach a monthly risk supplement to nearly every job in the organisation, and backdate the whole package to 1 July 2025. One group is written out of the supplement by name: the prison guard corps.

Decreto-Lei n.º 187/2026 and Decreto-Lei n.º 186/2026 both appeared in Série I n.º 180 of 16 September. They were approved in Council of Ministers on 23 July, promulgated by the President on 4 September and countersigned by the Prime Minister on 7 September. The cabinet stage of the larger one was reported at the start of July. The gazetted text carries a good deal that the announcement did not.

The supplement, and who is left out

The headline measure survives: staff in the two new special careers get a risk supplement of 225 euros a month, paid across twelve months and uprated by the annual public-administration reference increase.

What the decree adds is a new Article 26.º-B inserted into Decreto-Lei n.º 215/2012, which extends a risk supplement to workers in general careers at the DGRSP (Direção-Geral de Reinserção e Serviços Prisionais, the Directorate-General for Reintegration and Prison Services) as well. Senior technicians on the general career get 200 euros a month. Technical assistants get 140 euros. Operational assistants get 120 euros. Anyone already drawing a risk or function-burden supplement worth more than that keeps the difference as an additional payment for as long as they stay in the job.

Paragraph 6 of that new article then removes one group from all of it. In translation, it reads that the article does not apply to workers who form part of the prison guard corps, "whose remuneration supplements are set out in their own diploma". The guards are the most visible part of the prison service and the part with the longest record of industrial action, including a month-long strike in March. Their supplements are governed separately, and this package leaves them where they were.

A separate 120 euro supplement goes to whoever is designated as a technical supervisor of a reintegration team.

Two careers in, three out

Decreto-Lei n.º 187/2026 abolishes three unrevised careers that have been running on legislation from 1991 and 2001: senior social reintegration technician, professional social reintegration technician and senior re-education technician. In their place it creates two special careers, each with a single category. Técnico superior de reintegração social sits at functional complexity grade 3; técnico de reintegração social sits at grade 2. Both are worked under a public employment contract.

Staff in the old careers as at 30 June 2025 transfer automatically, with effect from 1 July 2025, keeping their posting. General-career senior technicians at the DGRSP who were in fact doing reintegration work can transfer too, and they get 60 days from the decree's entry into force to object. Objecting means staying in the reintegration role for up to 180 days, after which the DGRSP reassigns them to work that matches the general career.

The repositioning rule is one level up. Everyone moves to the pay position corresponding to the TRU level immediately above the level or base pay they held on 30 June 2025, and if that produces a gain of less than 28 euros they move up one position further. A further level is added with effect from 1 January 2026 and another from 1 January 2027. Workers with 20 or more years of effective service in the reintegration and re-education roles as at 31 December 2025 get 56 euros added to base pay before the repositioning is calculated. Accumulated performance points from the abolished careers do not carry over.

The multidisciplinary teams that advise the courts, which sit inside the Instituto da Segurança Social (Social Security Institute) rather than the DGRSP, move into the senior reintegration career on the same terms and draw the same 225 euro supplement.

The second decree abolishes a career outright

Decreto-Lei n.º 186/2026 is three articles long and does something more final. It abolishes the prison administrator career, a special-regime post created by Decreto-Lei n.º 351/99, and moves everyone in it into the ordinary senior technician career of the public service. Both Decreto-Lei n.º 351/99 and Decreto-Lei n.º 89/2003 are revoked.

The transfer is not supposed to cost anyone money. Staff are repositioned one remuneration level above what they held on 30 June 2025, with the same 28 euro floor on the gain. Their accumulated performance points stop counting, which the preamble concedes is a loss, and it builds in a safeguard for people whose promotion was blocked for years because no competitions were held and whose pay froze at the top of their category: 10 or more accumulated points buys another position from 1 January 2026, and 20 or more buys a further one from 1 January 2027.

New management posts, and a clean sweep of the current holders

The larger decree also rewrites the management layer. The post of deputy prison governor, which existed but had no defined pay status, becomes a third-degree intermediate management position with a three-year renewable commission, reserved for graduates of at least six or four years' standing depending on the prison. Where a prison has two or more deputies, at least one must come from the senior reintegration career.

Three new third-degree management posts are created alongside it: coordinator of a social reintegration team, coordinator of an electronic monitoring team, and coordinator of an educational centre. All are appointed by the justice minister on a non-binding proposal from the director-general, from among senior reintegration technicians who have been graduates for at least four years.

Article 26 then terminates every existing commission of service in the coordination and deputy-governor posts, and every current supervision designation, automatically on the day the decree enters into force. The holders stay in place only until successors are named.

What the job description reveals

Annex I sets out, at length, what these staff actually do, and the electronic monitoring section is the most concrete part of the whole package. Technicians fit the equipment, travelling to the address to check the conditions are suitable; they remove it when the sentence or measure ends; they replace devices "at any hour of the day or night"; they monitor defendants, convicted people and, in domestic violence cases, victims; they respond to alarms by going to the location; and they contact the victim if the aggressor approaches, calling in the criminal police where needed. The workload behind that description has grown sharply: electronic tags in domestic violence cases tripled between 2016 and 2025.

Article 7 attaches a set of special duties that read like a response to specific problems. Staff must keep professional confidentiality, must not disclose anything about the security or internal running of prisons or educational centres, must not give information or statements to the media about service matters without prior authorisation, and must not use social networks in a way that breaches those duties. They must carry valid professional identification whenever on duty, and must act promptly whenever they learn of anything that puts the person under supervision, a victim, a third party or the community at risk.

Article 8 goes further. Staff may not, directly or through an intermediary, do business with, take on debts to or provide services of any kind to people serving sentences or educational measures, or to their families. They may not accept gifts or advantages from those people, their families or anyone else on account of the job. They may not take part in cases involving relatives. And they may not serve as a juror or as a lay judge.

Anyone recruited by competition into either career has to stay in it for at least three years from the end of the entry training course, or reimburse the DGRSP for the training costs attributable to them.

Why it matters beyond the payroll

The DGRSP has been under pressure from several directions at once. It logged 28 deaths in custody through early June, it runs an electronic monitoring caseload that keeps expanding, and it has struggled to recruit and keep the technical staff who write the court reports that inform sentencing and supervise people serving community sentences.

The government's own framing is that these are the careers the 2012 merger of the prison service and the reintegration service left stranded, kept for more than two decades on rules that were never revised. Whether 225 euros a month and a clean career structure are enough to fix retention is a question for the next competition round. What the gazette settles is that the back pay runs to 1 July 2025, which is fourteen and a half months, and that the guards are still waiting on a diploma of their own.