Working on a public holiday: rights and pay

A public holiday is a paid rest day

The starting point of the regime is article 269(1) of the Portuguese Labour Code¹: the worker is entitled to the pay corresponding to the holiday, and the employer cannot offset it with extra work. In practice:

• anyone on a monthly salary loses nothing: the holiday is already paid inside the salary;
• anyone paid by the hour or by the day cannot lose pay because of the holiday either.

Working on a holiday: the two alternative rights

If you perform normal work on a public holiday in a company not obliged to suspend operations that day (restaurants, hotels, healthcare, authorised retail, continuous operations), the law grants an additional right, at the employer's choice (article 269(2))¹:

• a 50% uplift on the pay corresponding to the hours worked; or
• compensatory rest of half the number of hours worked.

The choice belongs to the employer, not the worker. The sector's collective agreement may set more favourable conditions, for example a 100% uplift or the worker's choice.

How much you receive, by salary

The uplift applies to the official hourly value of article 271⁴: (monthly salary × 12) ÷ (52 × weekly hours). For an 8-hour holiday on a 40-hour week:

Because the holiday itself is already paid inside the monthly salary, the uplift is the extra cash that appears on the payslip. Run your own numbers in the public-holiday pay calculator.

Company obliged to close: that is overtime

The 50% rule applies to companies that may operate on the holiday. If the company is obliged to suspend activity that day and the employee still works, that work is overtime, with the article 268 uplifts³: 50% per hour on a holiday, rising to 100% once the worker has performed 100 overtime hours in the year. The same goes for hours beyond the normal schedule on a holiday in any company. For that scenario, use the overtime calculator.

Which public holidays are mandatory

Portugal has 13 mandatory public holidays (article 234)²: 1 January, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, 25 April, 1 May, Corpus Christi, 10 June, 15 August, 5 October, 1 November, 1 December, 8 December and 25 December.

Carnival Tuesday and the local municipal holiday are optional (article 235): they only count as holidays if the company observes them, through a collective agreement or company practice. On those observed days the same rules of the mandatory holiday apply.

Working at night on a holiday

The regimes accumulate: hours worked in the night period of a holiday add the 25% night uplift (article 266) to the holiday regime. A night shift from 24 to 25 December can therefore combine the holiday uplift and the night uplift.

Does the uplift pay income tax and Social Security?

Yes. The holiday uplift is ordinary employment pay (category A): it has IRS withholding per the tables and pays the 11% employee Social Security, like the rest of the salary. It does not benefit from the reduced withholding that applies to overtime, which is specific to trabalho suplementar. The figures in this article are gross; to see the net effect, use the net-salary calculator.

An example from start to finish

Imagine a €1,000 salary, 40 weekly hours, and 8 hours worked on 1 May in a restaurant (a company not obliged to close):

• Hourly value: (1,000 × 12) ÷ (52 × 40) = €5.77.
• 50% uplift: €2.88 per hour × 8 h = €23.08 extra on that month's payslip.
• Alternative, if the employer prefers: 4 hours of paid compensatory rest.
• The holiday itself was already paid inside the €1,000.

Run the numbers for your case in the public-holiday pay calculator.