When a Creditor Reaches Your Pay or Your Bank Account in Portugal in 2026: A Practical Guide to the Penhora, the Two-Thirds Rule, the 920 Euro Floor, the Home That Is Reached Last, and the Ten Days to Object

Most people meet the Portuguese enforcement system the same way: a letter arrives, or a card payment is declined, and a bank balance that was there on Tuesday is frozen on Wednesday. The instrument is called a penhora, the closest English equivalent being attachment or seizure, and it is carried out by an agente de execução (enforcement agent), a private professional acting under a court file rather than a bailiff employed by the state.

The rules are not obscure. They sit in the Código de Processo Civil (Code of Civil Procedure), articles 735 to 785, and they are unusually specific about what a creditor may reach and what is placed beyond reach entirely. This guide sets out those limits as they stand in 2026, with the two figures that anchor almost all of them: the national minimum wage, fixed at 920 euros a month for 2026 by Decreto-Lei 139/2025, and the alçada, the value ceiling of a court, which is 5,000 euros for a first-instance court and 30,000 euros for a Court of Appeal.

What Happens First

An execution begins with a creditor holding an enforcement title: a judgment, an arbitral decision, certain notarised documents, or an injunção that went unopposed. Once the file is with an enforcement agent, article 749 gives that agent a maximum of 20 days for the preliminary search, and access to a specific set of databases: the tax authority, social security, and the land, commercial and vehicle registries.

What the agent may pull from those databases is limited by the same article. From the tax authority, your name, tax number and tax domicile. From the registries and social security, your name and your civil identification or social security beneficiary number. The purpose is locating assets, not building a profile.

There is also a ceiling on the whole exercise. Article 735(3) says the seizure is limited to what is needed to pay the debt plus the foreseeable costs of the execution, and it fixes those costs by presumption: 20 percent of the value of the execution where that value falls within the first-instance court's alçada, meaning up to 5,000 euros; 10 percent above that and up to four times the Court of Appeal's alçada, meaning up to 120,000 euros; and 5 percent above 120,000 euros. A 3,000 euro debt therefore supports a seizure of about 3,600 euros, not of everything you own.

Your Pay: The Two-Thirds Rule

Article 738 is the provision most people need. Two thirds of the net amount of wages, salaries, retirement pensions, any other social benefit, insurance payments, accident compensation, life annuities or any periodic payment that supports the debtor cannot be seized. Only legally compulsory deductions count towards working out that net amount, so a voluntary pension contribution or a savings transfer does not reduce the base.

That two-thirds protection is then bracketed at both ends. The maximum protected is three national minimum wages at the date of each seizure, which in 2026 is 2,760 euros. The minimum protected, where the debtor has no other income, is one national minimum wage, which is 920 euros.

Work through the arithmetic and the shape becomes clear. On a net salary of 1,200 euros, two thirds is 800, which is below the 920 floor, so 920 is protected and 280 may be taken. On a net salary of 4,500 euros, two thirds would be 3,000, above the 2,760 ceiling, so 2,760 is protected and 1,740 may be taken.

Your Bank Account

Article 738(5) protects, in a seizure of cash or of a bank balance, a total amount equal to one national minimum wage. In 2026 that is 920 euros, and it is a global figure rather than one per account.

Article 738(7) is the trap. The protections in paragraphs 1 and 5 are not cumulative. You cannot claim two thirds of your salary at source and then claim a further 920 euros on the balance once the same money has landed in the account. The system protects the income once.

Article 739 adds a useful corollary: money or a bank deposit that results from satisfying a claim that was itself unseizable stays unseizable on the same terms. Compensation that could not be attached at source does not become attachable simply because it has been paid.

The mechanics of a bank seizure are set out separately and are worth knowing because they explain the sequence. The agent notifies the credit institutions electronically, and the balance is blocked from the moment that communication is sent, up to the article 735(3) limit. The notification is void unless it identifies you and states the seizure limit in euros. Where you hold accounts jointly, the block falls on your share and equal shares are presumed. Where the specific account cannot be identified, your share of every deposit at the notified institutions is blocked. The order of preference is fixed: accounts you hold alone come before joint accounts, and among joint accounts those with fewer holders come first; term deposits come before current accounts. The banks then have two working days to report back electronically. Once blocked, only the enforcement agent may move the money.

If You Are Self-Employed

Article 738(8) extends the same protections to income earned in the activities listed in the table referred to in article 151 of the Código do IRS (Personal Income Tax Code), with adjustments. The net part is calculated by applying a coefficient of 0.75 to the total paid or made available, excluding VAT charged. The maximum and minimum protections are worked out globally each month by whoever is paying you.

The procedure runs through your client. Before paying you, the payer must tell the enforcement agent the total due, the protected amount and the amount to be seized. The agent then confirms or recalculates and communicates back within two working days. If that reply does not come, the payer pays you according to its own calculation.

Two conditions matter. This paragraph applies only to debtors who receive no wages, salary, pension or other subsistence payment in the month of the seizure. And a payer who ignores the rules is pursued in the file itself as an unfaithful depositary of the money it should have seized or handed over.

Maintenance Debts Are Different

Where the debt being enforced is maintenance, article 738(4) switches off the two-thirds rule and the minimum-wage floor entirely. What is protected instead is the amount equivalent to the full non-contributory social pension, a considerably lower figure. Portuguese law treats an unpaid maintenance obligation as a claim that outranks the debtor's ordinary standard of living.

Asking the Judge to Reduce It

Article 738(6) is the safety valve, and it is underused. Weighing the amount and nature of the debt against the needs of the debtor and the household, the judge may, exceptionally and on the debtor's application, reduce the seizable part of income for a period the judge considers reasonable, and may even exempt income from seizure entirely for up to one year.

This is a discretionary remedy and it has to be asked for. It is not applied automatically because your circumstances are difficult, and the application should carry evidence of household composition, dependants, rent or mortgage and any health costs.

What Can Never Be Taken

Article 736 lists what is absolutely unseizable, on top of anything exempted by special legislation:

• Things or rights that cannot be transferred at all
• Assets in the public domain of the State and other public bodies
• Objects whose seizure would offend good morals or lacks economic justification because their resale value is trivial
• Objects specifically intended for public worship
• Tombs
• Instruments and objects indispensable to people with disabilities and to the treatment of the sick
• Companion animals

That last item was added by Lei 8/2017, the statute that stopped treating animals as ordinary property in Portuguese law. A creditor cannot take your dog.

Article 737 covers what is conditionally protected. Work tools and objects indispensable to your professional activity or training are exempt, unless you yourself point to them for seizure, unless the execution is for the price of acquiring or the cost of repairing them, or unless they are seized as physical components of a business. Goods indispensable to any household that are in the debtor's actual home are also exempt, again unless the debt is for their purchase price or repair.

Your Home Is Reached Last

Article 751 sets the order. Seizure begins with the assets easiest to convert to money and proportionate to the size of the claim. The creditor may indicate a preference, and the enforcement agent must respect it, unless doing so would breach a mandatory rule, offend the principle of proportionality, or clearly break that easiest-first rule.

Property other than your permanent home, and commercial establishments, may be seized even where the value is excessive relative to the debt, but only if seizing other assets presumably would not satisfy the creditor in full within six months.

For your permanent own home the test is much harder, and it splits by the size of the debt. Where the execution is worth up to twice the first-instance alçada, meaning up to 10,000 euros, the home may be seized only if seizing other assets presumably would not satisfy the creditor in full within 30 months. Where the execution is worth more than 10,000 euros, that window shortens to 12 months.

Note what this does and does not do. It is a sequencing rule, not an exemption. A permanent home is not unseizable in Portugal; it is simply the last thing reached, and on a smaller debt the creditor must first demonstrate that nothing else will do the job inside two and a half years.

If You Are Married

Article 740 deals with a case that catches foreign couples repeatedly. Where an execution runs against one spouse alone and jointly owned marital assets are seized because the debtor has no sufficient assets of their own, the other spouse is summoned and has 20 days either to apply for separation of assets or to file proof that such an application is already pending. Miss that window and the execution proceeds against the joint assets.

Article 741 runs the other way. A creditor may argue that the debt is common to both spouses. The non-debtor spouse is then summoned and has 20 days to say whether the common character is accepted, and silence is treated as acceptance. Both of these are 20-day deadlines that start on service, and both are lost by inaction.

Objecting: Ten Days

Article 784 sets out the grounds on which a debtor may oppose a seizure of their own goods: that the specific goods taken could not be seized at all, or not to the extent they were; that goods which only answer for the debt subsidiarily were seized immediately; or that the seizure hit goods which under substantive law do not answer for the debt at all.

Article 785 sets the deadline, and it is short: the opposition must be filed within 10 days of being notified of the act of seizure. Filing it does not stop the process. The execution is suspended only if the debtor provides security, and even then the suspension is confined to the goods the opposition concerns, with the execution free to continue against others. Where the opposition concerns the property that is the debtor's effective home, a separate protective rule applies.

Ten days is the number to remember. Almost every remedy in this area is lost by letting a notification sit unopened.

What This Means for You

• If you are employed on a Portuguese contract: your floor is 920 euros a month and your ceiling of protection is 2,760. Work out which side of the two-thirds calculation your net pay falls on before assuming anything about how much a seizure will actually cost you each month.
• If you are a freelancer or a recibos verdes worker: the 0.75 coefficient and the monthly global calculation apply only if you draw no salary or pension that month. If you have any employed income alongside your invoicing, the ordinary two-thirds rule governs instead, and the arithmetic is different.
• If you keep savings in a joint account: the presumption of equal shares is the rule, and it applies even where one holder contributed everything. Sole accounts are targeted before joint ones and term deposits before current accounts, which means a term deposit is not the safe corner it is often assumed to be.
• If you own property here but live mainly abroad: the protective sequencing in article 751(4) attaches to your habitação própria permanente, your permanent own home. A holiday house or a rented-out flat sits in the weaker category and can be seized on the six-month test even where its value far exceeds the debt.
• If you are married under a foreign regime: take the 20-day summons in articles 740 and 741 seriously and take advice on it immediately. A spouse who does not respond to a communicability notice is treated as having accepted that the debt is common.
• If you are struggling: article 738(6) exists and is applied for, not granted automatically. An application supported by evidence of dependants, housing costs and health expenses is the correct route, and it can suspend seizure of income for up to a year.

None of this substitutes for a lawyer once a file is open, and legal aid through Segurança Social is available on a means test to residents holding a valid permit. But the rules themselves are public, they are written in reasonably plain terms, and they are more protective than most people expect. The thing that most often costs people money in a Portuguese execution is not the law. It is the ten days.