Portugal Narrows the €750 Retirement-Delay Bonus for Teachers to Staff-Short Regions and Switches to Year-Round Hiring
The government has confined the €750 monthly bonus for teachers who delay retirement to the eight zones where schools are hardest to staff — Greater Lisbon, Setúbal and the Algarve — and scrapped fixed hiring rounds for a rolling competition, both under its '+ Aulas + Sucesso' plan for the new schoo
Portugal has been paying teachers a €750 monthly bonus to stay in the classroom past the age at which they could retire. From September, that money will no longer be on offer everywhere. At a Council of Ministers meeting, the government decided to confine the incentive to the parts of the country where schools cannot find enough staff — and, alongside it, to tear up the calendar-bound system for placing teachers in favour of hiring that runs all year round. Both measures are billed as part of a plan the Education Ministry calls “+ Aulas + Sucesso” (More Classes, More Success), aimed at stopping pupils losing weeks of lessons to unfilled posts.
The retirement bonus, now geographically targeted
The €750 top-up rewards teachers who defer retirement and keep working. Last school year some 2,200 teachers took it up nationwide. Education Minister Fernando Alexandre said the measure had “functioned” but that in many cases it was “not justified” — paying a premium to retain teachers in areas that were never short of them. So the bonus is being narrowed to the eight Quadros de Zona Pedagógica (Pedagogical Zone Boards) identified as the hardest to staff, a belt that runs across Greater Lisbon, the Setúbal Peninsula and the Algarve. In practice that covers 235 school groupings (agrupamentos), down from 258 the year before, and the change takes effect with the new school year in September.
The targeting reflects a stubborn geography of teacher shortages that has little to do with the national headcount. Portugal produces enough teachers overall, but too few are willing to take low-paid postings far from home in the expensive coastal districts around the capital and in the south — the same imbalance flagged when this year’s national teacher competition posted 19,172 placements but only 213 net new entrants.
From fixed competitions to rolling hiring
The second decision is structurally bigger. The cabinet approved, in principle, a new recruitment model that collapses the tangle of periodic concursos (competitions) into just two procedures: a single internal-and-external competition to fill permanent posts, and a second, continuously running process — operating daily — to cover schools’ temporary staffing needs as they arise. Under it, a school that loses a teacher in October need not wait for the next scheduled round to fill the gap. Alexandre said the change would allow “a more rapid and efficient placement of teachers.” The overhaul, tied to the wider renegotiation of the Estatuto da Carreira Docente (Teaching Career Statute) reopened with the unions last year, is set to enter into force for the 2027/28 school year.
The same meeting also moved to widen the ban on smartphones in schools up to the 9th year — the 3.º ciclo, or 7th to 9th grades — building on the existing prohibition across the 1.º and 2.º ciclos that already keeps phones out of classrooms up to the sixth year. Schools will have until January 2027 to adapt their internal rules; the ministry pointed to its own data showing that where phones were barred, pupil socialising rose 36 percent and indiscipline fell.
For foreign families, the shortages are not an abstraction: they determine whether a child’s school can keep a full timetable through the year. The measures are the government’s attempt to steer scarce teachers toward the places that need them most, after a bruising stretch that included a criminal complaint over the botched digital grading of national exams. Parents enrolling a child for the first time can find the practical steps in our guide to enrolling in a Portuguese public school.
