Three More Segurança Social Certificates Now Reach Your Phone Directly, Including Proof of a Certified Occupational Disease

Three more official certificates can now be issued straight from the Segurança Social mobile app. The Instituto da Segurança Social announced the change this week: the documents in question relate to certified occupational disease and to pension income, and they no longer require the desktop portal or a visit to a counter.

The three new declarations are:

• Doença Profissional Certificada: the official document confirming that an occupational disease has been recognised and certified.
• Rendimentos de Pensões por Doença Certificada: a statement itemising the annual or monthly amounts received under certified occupational-disease pensions.
• Rendimentos de Pensões por Morte: a detailed statement of survivor pensions and death-related support received.

The route inside the app is Menu, then Declarações, then Consultar e obter declarações. The institute's own framing is that the change "reinforces the dematerialisation of processes" and gives faster, more convenient access to official documents from anywhere.

Why these three, and who needs them

None of these is a document you request often, which is precisely why they used to cost a trip. A certified occupational-disease declaration is what an employer, an insurer or a court asks for when incapacity has to be evidenced. Pension income statements are what a landlord, a bank underwriting a mortgage, or the tax office wants when income has to be proved.

Survivor-pension statements matter for a different group again: widowed spouses and dependants, often older, often the least likely to want to navigate a desktop portal. Putting that document on a phone removes one queue from a process that already involves several.

The move follows a related change earlier in August. Anyone with a Segurança Social-certified occupational disease who has paid for health care or treatment can now request reimbursement online through the portal, covering what the system calls prestações em espécie: medical and pharmaceutical assistance, diagnostic tests, treatments, prostheses and orthoses, and travel.

Part of a wider shift

Segurança Social has been steadily moving documentary work out of its offices. The self-service certificate that proves you owe the institution nothing is already free and instant online, and address changes now propagate across the Cartão de Cidadão, the domicílio fiscal and the SNS through a single set of updates.

The same digital tooling is doing work on the enforcement side. Yesterday the institute reported that proof-of-life checks and cross-border data matching had saved 76.5 million euros in eight months. The infrastructure that lets a pensioner download a statement in ten seconds is the same infrastructure that lets the state see, in near real time, which payments should have stopped.

What this means for you

• If you are a foreign resident: the app follows your NISS, not your nationality. If you have a Portuguese social security number and app access, these declarations are available to you on the same terms.
• If you need a document for an authority abroad: a PDF pulled from the app carries the same validation code as the portal version, but confirm in advance whether the receiving body requires a certified translation.
• If you are claiming occupational-disease costs: the reimbursement route and the certificate now sit in the same place. Gather receipts before filing; travel to appointments is claimable.
• If you still cannot log in: app access depends on Segurança Social Direta credentials. Recovering those remains a slower, mostly offline process, and it is worth doing before you need a document urgently.

The practical gain here is small per person and large in aggregate. Portugal's social security counters have long been where straightforward paperwork went to wait, and the institute's answer, consistently, has been to take the simplest transactions out of the room entirely. Each certificate moved to the app is one fewer appointment competing with the cases that genuinely need a human being.