Portugal Offers Its Border Officers 160 Euros a Month Backdated to July, and 230 From Next Year, to Stop Them Leaving the Passport Desks

The officers who check passports at Portuguese airports, land crossings and ports have been offered a supplement of their own: 160 euros a month this year, backdated to July, rising to 230 euros in 2027. The Ministério da Administração Interna (Ministry of Internal Administration) put the figure on the table on Thursday, at the first meeting since it resumed negotiations with the PSP's unions and the GNR's professional associations.

The payment is aimed at two specific units rather than the forces as a whole: the Unidade Nacional de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (National Foreigners and Borders Unit) of the Polícia de Segurança Pública, which runs the air borders, and the Unidade de Controlo Costeiro e de Fronteiras (Coastal and Border Control Unit) of the Guarda Nacional Republicana, which covers land and sea.

Why a separate payment for border work

The ministry's justification is that border control is a distinct job rather than ordinary policing in a different building. In its own description, the work requires specific training, highly specialised technical knowledge and the permanent application of both national and European law, and it covers document verification, fraud detection, database queries, assessment of entry conditions and decisions with consequences for internal security and freedom of movement.

The candid part of the ministry's case is about retention, not reward. The supplement, it says, is meant to help keep qualified professionals in place and to "prevent a new degradation of a service that is strategic for Portugal". That is an unusual admission to find in a government communiqué, and it points at a problem this publication has tracked since the border unit was created.

The staffing hole behind the offer

The PSP's border unit took over the air borders after SEF was wound up. A year on, we reported that it had poured almost 400 officers into airport queues, drawing them from commands in the interior that were already thin. The same unit's workload has grown again since: Portugal's screening centres and twelve-week border returns became law on 11 September, and the European biometric entry and exit system is being rolled out across the same desks.

Against that, 160 euros a month is a modest instrument. It is also, on the ministry's own framing, a second layer on top of the risk and service supplement that all officers receive, whose fixed component reached 400 euros this year after rises of 200 euros in 2024 and 50 euros in each of 2025 and 2026. Remunerated outside services went up 15 percent in February, the first revision in more than nine years, and all other supplements rose 2.15 percent after 16 years untouched.

The unions have not said yes

The ministry says it will send the drafted text to the unions and associations in the coming days for a final decision. It has not been accepted. The PSP and GNR representative bodies came out of Thursday's meeting without an agreement and their protest actions continue, with the border supplement itself the point in dispute.

That leaves the government in a familiar position. It has now conceded that structural problems in the security forces have accumulated over years and "are not solved in a few months", while offering a targeted payment to the one unit whose staffing directly determines how long the queue runs at Humberto Delgado on a July morning. Lisbon's mayor spent August complaining that not one of the 200 police promised to the city in May had arrived, which is the other end of the same shortage.

For travellers and for foreign residents renewing documents, nothing changes at the desk this month. What is being negotiated is whether the people staffing it stay.