Ten Months After Promising a New Bank Tax, the Government Has Delivered Nothing — and Won't Say Why

Ten months ago, as he presented the 2026 State Budget, Finance Minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento promised that the government would find a new, constitutionally sound way to tax Portugal's banks. Since then: nothing. No draft, no structure, no revenue target — and, when the news agency Lusa asked the Finance Ministry several times where the measure had gone, no answer.

The result is one of the quieter but more telling gaps in the government's fiscal record. The banks themselves report that they have had no developments and no contacts on the matter, and the promised law that was supposed to reach Parliament in the first half of 2026 simply never arrived.

How the promise came about

The starting point was a defeat. In June 2025, the Constitutional Court struck down the Adicional de Solidariedade sobre o Setor Bancário (ASSB, the banking-sector solidarity surcharge), a levy the previous Socialist government had created in 2020, nominally to help fund Social Security during the pandemic. The court found it breached the principles of tax equality and ability to pay. Scrapping it left the state having to refund banks somewhere in the region of €180–200 million collected between 2020 and 2024.

Rather than let bank taxation simply shrink, Sarmento pledged a replacement. On 9 October 2025, presenting the budget, he said the government would "revisit the issue of taxation of this sector and look for other forms of taxation that do not have an unconstitutionality problem." A few weeks later, on 3 November, he was more specific: a new bank levy would be drafted and presented to Parliament during the first half of 2026, designed to avoid the fate of the one the court had just killed. That half-year came and went.

What banks already pay — and what is wobbling

Portugal's banks are not untaxed. Alongside standard corporate income tax (IRC) and its municipal surcharge (derrama), the sector pays two dedicated contributions:

• The contribuição sobre o setor bancário (banking-sector contribution), created in 2011 and kept by every government since, raised in the order of €190 million in 2025, with roughly €210 million pencilled in for 2026.
• The additional periodic contribution to the Fundo de Resolução (Resolution Fund), the pot that backstops bank failures, brought in about €59 million in 2025.

The abolished ASSB, by comparison, had raised around €50 million a year. But the picture became more complicated in July 2026, when the Constitutional Court ruled that the mechanism behind the Resolution Fund's additional contribution was itself unconstitutional, because the rate was being set by the Bank of Portugal rather than fixed in law by Parliament. The ruling applied, for now, only to the specific case before the court, but it hangs over another slice of the sector's tax bill — and adds to the legal minefield any new levy would have to cross.

Why the debate will not go away

The political pressure to tax banks harder comes straight from their results. Sector profits hit a record €6.3 billion in 2024, up 13% on the year. 2025 was better still: the five largest banks together cleared more than €5 billion, with state-owned Caixa Geral de Depósitos posting €1,904 million and BCP a record €1,018.6 million. On profitability, Portuguese banks were the most lucrative in the euro area last year, with return on equity for the biggest names around 16%, well above the euro-area average of roughly 10%.

The banks argue they already carry more than their share. At an October 2025 industry conference, BPI's chief executive, João Pedro Oliveira e Costa, said he saw "no reason, other than a purely ideological one, to burden banks with more taxes," and pointed to the hundreds of millions his bank has paid into the Resolution Fund — "I didn't break any glass, [yet] I'll have to pay for the whole party." BCP's Miguel Maya warned that such charges undercut the sector's ability to compete, and Santander Portugal's Pedro Castro e Almeida said talk of higher taxes "makes no sense" when it discourages jobs and investment.

What this means for expats

A stalled bank tax may sound like an insider's fiscal spat, but it touches anyone who keeps their money in Portugal.

• Bank charges and pricing: Whenever a new sector tax is floated, banks warn it could be passed through to customers in fees or loan pricing. The flip side is that a well-designed levy is the government's answer to record profits earned partly on the back of higher interest rates paid by borrowers.
• The mortgage backdrop: Those same record profits sit alongside a period of rising repayments for households. If you hold or are seeking a home loan, the sector's health is your backdrop — see our coverage of how August mortgage bills are climbing as Euribor feeds through.
• Where to park savings: With banks flush and competition for deposits fierce, the state's own savings certificates have been climbing again, and challengers such as Revolut, now claiming third-largest-bank status in Portugal, are actively bidding for savers. It pays to shop around.
• A credibility question: For residents trying to read where Portuguese tax policy is heading, an unfulfilled, unexplained promise is a data point in itself. It sits alongside the wider picture of what you actually owe as a taxpayer here, where the direction of travel matters as much as today's rates.

The government has offered no explanation for the delay, but the reasons are not hard to guess: any new levy risks the same constitutional challenge that felled the last two, and the banks are lobbying hard against it. What is missing is the candour to say so. Ten months after the promise, the only certainty is that the sector had its best year on record — and still faces no new tax to show for it.