The Tax Authority Has Emailed 33,381 Landlords About Contracts Its Own System Still Calls Active, and Gives Them Until 30 September to Reply

The Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira (Tax and Customs Authority) emailed 33,381 taxpayers in August about rental contracts its records still show as running. Each is registered on the Portal das Finanças (the tax portal) as active, as non-renewable, and as having passed its end date, with the deadline for reporting the end long gone. The message asks recipients to answer an alert on the portal by 30 September, reporting alterations or terminations.

Some of the landlords who received it say they closed those contracts years ago.

Two owners described their cases to Lusa. One sold the flat in 2022 and paid capital gains tax on it, says she reported the end of the tenancy at the time, and still finds the old contract listed as live. In the second, the contract ended in 2025 and the property has since been re-let under a new contract, itself properly registered, while the earlier one still shows as active.

Asked whether the emails had gone out in error, the tax authority did not dispute the possibility. "Since there is a time lag between the selection and the issuing of the alerts, it is possible that there have been situations in which taxpayers had already regularised their position at a date prior to receiving this alert," it said. The 33,381 figure is the whole universe of recipients, selected because their contracts were "registered as active, non-renewable and with an end date already passed, prior to 1 April 2026." How many went to people with nothing to fix is not known.

What the Law Actually Requires

The obligation sits in article 60 of the Código do Imposto do Selo (Stamp Duty Code). Landlords and sub-landlords must report their rental and sub-rental contracts, the promises of them, any changes and their termination. The window is the same in every case: by the end of the month following the start of the tenancy, the change or the termination. The declaration goes on the official Modelo 2 do Imposto do Selo, and counts as filed at the tax office covering the property's location. If a landlord does not make the communication, the same article lets the tenant make it instead.

The one-month rule that catches the start of a tenancy catches its end, and that is what generated this list: a contract whose stated end date has passed and whose termination was never filed looks, to the system, like an ongoing tenancy nobody is declaring.

What to Do If You Received One

The tax authority's instruction to those who believe they already filed is narrow and worth following literally. They "should check the status of their rental contract or contracts on the Portal das Finanças and confirm that the termination was correctly communicated to the AT, with no further action being necessary."

So do not assume the alert is a mistake and ignore it, and do not file a second termination on top of a first. Open the contract in the portal's rental area and read what it says. If it is still marked active and should not be, file the termination now. If it is genuinely renewable and was recorded as non-renewable when first registered, correct the classification rather than ending anything.

This matters beyond tidiness, because a contract the portal believes is live is a contract the tax authority believes is producing Category F rental income. That assumption feeds pre-filled returns and assessments, and it is easier to correct a record now than to argue about an assessment built on it later. Our guide to declaring rental income as a landlord covers Category F and the electronic rent receipt, and the tenant guide to the contrato de arrendamento the other side of it.

The alerts land in an already unsettled rental market. The government scrapped its old affordable-rent programme on 1 September without the replacement being usable, and the rules on first refusal when a let property is sold turn on exactly the kind of contract record the tax authority is now asking 33,381 people to check.