Portugal Unpicks the Troika-Era Merger That Built the IMT, Blaming It for Bottlenecks, and Moves Rail Safety to the Transport Regulator on 1 October

Portugal has torn up the organisational law that has governed its transport administration since the bailout years. Decreto-Lei n.º 179/2026 (Decree-Law 179/2026), published in the Diário da República (the official gazette) on Monday, revokes Decreto-Lei 236/2012 outright, approves a new statute for the Instituto da Mobilidade e dos Transportes (Institute for Mobility and Transport, IMT) and moves rail safety out of the institute altogether. It takes effect on the first working day of the month after publication, which is Thursday 1 October.

The preamble is unusually blunt about what it is undoing. The 2012 merger folded four separate bodies into one institute during the period of external financial assistance, in the name of rationalising state structures. Fourteen years on, the government writes, that fusion "generated an overload on human resources and a meagre management structure, producing inefficiencies, bottlenecks in the operational management of processes and an inability to respond adequately to the transformation taking place in the sector".

What changes on 1 October

• A bigger board. The IMT will be run by a president, a vice-president and three members, on five-year mandates renewable once, appointed by order of the minister responsible for infrastructure.
• Every management post is vacated. Article 8 terminates the service commissions of all the institute's serving senior managers automatically when the decree enters into force. They stay in post only until replacements are effectively appointed.
• Rail safety leaves. The functions the IMT holds as Portugal's national rail safety authority, under EU Directive 2016/798 and Delegated Regulation 2018/761, pass to the Autoridade da Mobilidade e dos Transportes (Mobility and Transport Authority, AMT), the sector regulator. The institute keeps only the licensing of operators' access to the market. The law allows 90 days to finish the handover.
• Staff get a choice. Employees moving with those functions have 90 days to keep their public-employment tie, in which case they work at the AMT on secondment, or to sign an individual employment contract on the regulator's own terms.
• A performance bonus is promised. Senior technical staff on the institute's payroll may benefit from an incentive scheme tied to measurable service improvement, to be set out in a separate law after collective bargaining.

What does not change is the part of the IMT the public actually touches. The new statute keeps learner permits and driving licences, the licensing and inspection of driving schools and examining bodies, professional driver certification, vehicle homologation, micromobility licensing and tachograph supervision inside the institute. It also lets the IMT create up to six multidisciplinary teams and, where internal resources fall short, project teams with a coordinator-general, three coordinators and as many as 15 consultants.

The decree was approved in Council of Ministers on 9 July, promulgated by President António José Martins Seguro on 28 August and countersigned on 31 August. It carries the signatures of Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, Finance Minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, Presidency Minister António Leitão Amaro and Infrastructure Minister Miguel Pinto Luz. It is the second redraw of a state agency's boundaries published in a week, after the reshaping of the environment agencies, and it lands three days after the rewritten public contracts code, which also starts on 1 October.

What this means for residents

• Your paperwork rules are untouched. Nothing in this decree alters the substantive requirements for a Portuguese licence. The deadlines and routes in our guides to exchanging a foreign driving licence and to the points system still apply.
• Expect churn, not speed, in the short run. A simultaneous change of every director, alongside a 90-day transfer of staff to another body, is not a recipe for faster processing this autumn. If you have a renewal or an exchange due, file it rather than leave it.
• Rail complaints will have a new address. Once the transition closes, safety oversight of the railways sits with the AMT, which already handles passenger-facing regulation.
• Fees stay ministerial. The institute's charges continue to be fixed and updated by joint order of the finance and infrastructure ministers, and the statute expressly lists late-payment interest among the IMT's own revenue.

The practical test arrives in the first quarter of next year, when the new board has been named and the rail safety files have physically moved. Until then, the government has published an admission that the structure it inherited did not work, and set itself 90 days to prove the replacement does.