Portugal Raises the Displaced-Student Housing Grant to €161 a Month and Drops the Rental-Contract Requirement

Portugal has quietly rewritten one of the most frustrating rules facing university students who move away from home to study — and the change matters to any foreign resident whose children are heading into the Portuguese higher-education system. Under a new scholarship regulation published on 10 August in the Diário da República, the state's monthly housing top-up for grant-holding estudantes deslocados (displaced students) rises from about €92 to around €161 a month, and — crucially — students no longer need a formal rental contract to claim it. It is a direct response to a rental market where, as officials openly acknowledge, most student rooms are let with no paperwork at all.

What changed

The reform comes via Portaria n.º 331-B/2026/1, which approves a new Regulamento de Atribuição de Bolsas de Estudo a Estudantes do Ensino Superior (RABEEES — Regulation on the Award of Higher-Education Scholarships) and puts into effect a structural overhaul set out in July's enabling decree-law. The headline for displaced grant-holders is the accommodation supplement, now pegged at 30% of the Indexante dos Apoios Sociais (IAS, the social-support index) — roughly €161 in 2026 — up from the previous 17.5% of the IAS, worth about €92.

The Minister for Education, Science and Innovation, Fernando Alexandre, framed it in round numbers: "the amount handed to the student rises to €160, against the €92 they were receiving." The same 30%-of-IAS figure also becomes the ceiling on what a scholarship student can be charged for a bed in a public university residence.

Goodbye to the rental-contract trap

The change likeliest to relieve real headaches is procedural. Until now, a displaced student had to produce a signed contrato de arrendamento (rental contract) to unlock the housing support — a document that thousands simply could not get, because so much of the student-room market operates informally, cash-in-hand and lease-free. Under the new rules the contract requirement is dropped: a displaced scholarship student now needs only to prove that they applied for a place in a university residence and were not given one. Displaced status itself is established by the student's own declaration, made under compromisso de honra (a declaration of honour) setting out their permanent address, where they study and why they need to relocate.

"The state is transferring the accommodation top-up, in a mea culpa, and the student decides what to do with that money," said Francisco Fernandes, president of the Federação Académica do Porto (Porto Academic Federation), welcoming the shift. Students are no longer obliged to live in a public residence to benefit — they can take the money and share a flat with friends instead.

Who counts as "displaced" — and how the top-up scales

A student is automatically presumed displaced when their permanent home lies 50 kilometres or more from campus; below that distance, the institution can still grant the status case by case, weighing public-transport times and timetable clashes. Where a displaced student applied for a residence bed and none was available, the grant is topped up (a majoração) toward a locally set private-accommodation value — and those ceilings track the cost of each city. They run to €500 in Lisbon, €488 in Cascais, €459 in Oeiras, €419 in Porto, €395 in Matosinhos, €367 in Vila Nova de Gaia and €338 in Coimbra. In Lisbon, that means the €161 base plus a €339 top-up — €500 in total toward the rent.

Those figures are a tacit admission of how far grants had fallen behind the market. Room rents in the big cities have climbed to new highs as the promised expansion of public beds lags far behind demand — the very squeeze that pushed cities like Braga to convert a derelict soap factory into the country's largest public student residence.

A phased rollout, with the bigger fight deferred

For the 2026-2027 academic year, only three parts of the new system switch on: the enhanced displaced-student housing support, a one-off bolsa de incentivo (incentive grant, worth twice the IAS, around €1,075) for first-time entrants from the lowest-income households, and the new procedure for recognising displaced status. The rest of the scholarship machinery keeps running on the old 2012 rules for one more year, with the full new calculation model — which will size each grant against the estimated real cost of studying in a given city, minus what the family can contribute — arriving only in 2027-2028.

Overall the government puts about €220 million behind the reform, a 31% increase, and projects the average annual scholarship rising from €1,734 to €2,660. Student leaders are broadly welcoming but wary of what the 2027-2028 recalculation will do to eligibility. "In 2027/28 there could be a change to eligibility — that is, to the number of grants — and that is what worries us," Fernandes cautioned.

What this means for foreign residents

If your child is applying to a Portuguese public university, the practical question is whether they can access these grants at all — and the answer turns on residence status, not passport. Need-based DGES scholarships are open to Portuguese citizens, to EU nationals with the right to permanent residence in Portugal, and to non-EU nationals who hold permanent or long-term residence (or come from a country with a reciprocal-treatment agreement), as well as refugees and those under humanitarian protection — all subject to the usual means test. In short, a settled foreign-resident family whose child qualifies economically can tap both the grant and the new €161 housing supplement.

The important caveat is that this is separate from the fee-paying estatuto de estudante internacional (international-student status), the admissions track used by students who come to Portugal specifically to study. Newcomers on that route generally do not qualify for these bolsas unless they independently meet the permanent- or long-term-residence conditions. For families already building a life here, though, the message is encouraging: the single biggest out-of-pocket cost of sending a child away to study — the rent — just got a larger, and far less bureaucratic, public subsidy.