Up to €288 a Month More, Backdated to July 2025: the Plan to Make Portugal's Registry Careers Attractive Again

A draft decree-law published on 3 August in the Boletim do Trabalho e Emprego (Labour and Employment Bulletin) rewrites the pay scales for the two careers that staff Portugal's conservatórias: conservadores de registos (registrars) and oficiais de registos (registry officers). Its 20-day public consultation has closed and the Council of Ministers is expected to approve it shortly. The stated objective is to correct salary asymmetries and make the careers attractive again.

What is on the table

The revision runs in three steps, 2025 to 2027, and its pay effects are backdated to 1 July 2025. The conservador scale is cut from ten positions to nine and three complementary levels are dropped, running from level 43 to level 84, worth €2,961.89 and €5,327.53 respectively on the current single pay scale.

Staff already in post on 30 June 2025 are repositioned, as a rule one level up. If that move is worth less than €28, they advance one further position, roughly €56 more. The largest gain from repositioning is €288.49 a month, for a conservador moving from level 54 to level 59, and it sits in the middle of the table rather than at either end. Elsewhere the jumps are smaller: €57.71 from level 42 to 43, €173.10 from 46 to 49, €115.42 from 62 to 64. The whole process depends on completion of the 2023/2024 performance-evaluation cycle.

The oficiais fare differently. Their career becomes unicategorial, collapsing two parallel structures and four complementary levels into a single 11-position table. The biggest repositioning gain is €230.79, from level 49 to 53. At the bottom, an officer on level 15 (€1,446.51) moves to level 18 (€1,604.41), a rise of €157.90. Time served in the old ajudante and escriturário careers counts in full toward the transition.

The corrective clauses, and the new entry bar

Two provisions target people the system left behind. Conservadores and oficiais with 20 or more years of effective service at the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado (Institute of Registries and Notaries, IRN) who sit in the lowest positions get €56 added to base pay for repositioning purposes only, up to the third position for conservadores and the fifth for oficiais. Former escriturários who met the requirements for promotion to escriturário superior but were never promoted for budgetary reasons get €140 added on the same basis.

Officers who handle cash at a conservatória gain an abono para falhas, a supplement covering shortfalls in collection, with the amount set later by portaria. Entry to the career will now require a degree in Law, Solicitadoria or Public Administration, and a new recruit owes two years in post after the trial period.

Why the state is paying now

Because the counters are failing. When the registry union struck for six days in June, it counted 279 vacant conservador posts, 38 percent of the total, and 2,731 unfilled oficial posts, 55 percent. This month the same union reported that the backlog grew 13 percent in a single month, from 40,947 to 46,289 delay-days, and that the IRN stopped publishing the global totals. Empresa na Hora, built to incorporate a company in one sitting, now leaves founders waiting months for an appointment. And it is the same institute that is working through 3,312 preliminary nationality refusals.

What this means for foreign residents

• Nothing changes at the counter tomorrow. The diploma has not been approved, and even once it is, a pay scale does not create a conservador. Recruitment and training follow.
• Watch the entry rule. Requiring a Law, Solicitadoria or Public Administration degree of every new oficial raises the quality bar and narrows the pool at the same time, in a career already 55 percent short.
• The 2027 column is provisional. The draft prices 2027 against the 2026 single pay scale, so actual 2027 salaries will be higher once that year's update is applied. Do not read the published figures as final.
• If you are waiting on a registry act, the delay is structural rather than personal. Our citizenship guide sets out which steps sit with the IRN and which do not.

Read together, the tables tell you where the state thinks it is losing people: not at the bottom of the ladder but in the middle, where an experienced oficial or a mid-career conservador can walk into private practice. Whether €288 a month is enough to hold them is the question the backlog will answer, and it will answer it in delay-days.