Capital gains on an inherited home in Portugal: how the tax is actually calculated

Inheriting is free, selling is not

Two moments usually get mixed up in the same conversation, and it helps to separate them.

Receiving the inheritance produces no income tax. It can produce stamp duty, at the 10% rate of item 1.2 of the general table, but article 6.º of that code exempts the spouse, the civil partner, descendants and ascendants⁴. In the overwhelming majority of family inheritances, therefore, receiving costs nothing.

Selling the inherited property is another matter. That is an onerous disposal of a real right over immovable property, which is exactly the taxable event of category G. And the calculation made at that moment has two pieces specific to inheritances, which is where almost every mistake comes from: the acquisition value and the acquisition date.

The acquisition value is the tax value at the date of death

On a house you bought, the acquisition value is the price on the deed. On an inherited house there is no price at all, because nobody paid anything for it.

Article 45.º, n.º 1 of the income tax code solves the problem by requiring, for assets acquired free of charge, the value that was taken into account for stamp duty or, where that duty was not due, the value that would have served as its base¹. Since inheritances between close family are exempt, it is almost always this second limb that applies.

And what value is that? Article 13.º, n.º 1 of the stamp duty code fixes it: for buildings, it is the tax value on the register at the date of the transmission².

In practice, that is the figure on the caderneta predial at the time, the one entered on the death declaration filed with the tax office. If you do not have it, request it through the Portal das Finanças or at the tax office for the area: it is the number that decides the size of your gain.

The two-years-back rule is not for inheritances

This is the costliest error in circulation, and it circulates on large sites.

Paragraph 3 of article 45.º requires, for buildings, the tax value on the register up to two years before the gift. But that provision opens with four words that change everything: in the case of exempt gifts¹.

Law 12/2022 introduced it with a clear anti-abuse purpose: to stop someone triggering a rise in a property’s tax value and gifting it immediately afterwards to a child, so that the child’s future gain would be artificially shrunk. It is a rule designed for a planned transaction between living people, on a date chosen by whoever makes it.

An inheritance has none of that. Nobody chooses the date of a death. The legislator wrote gifts, not gratuitous transfers, even though the broader concept exists and is used elsewhere in the same code. In a succession by death, n.º 1 applies, with the value at the date of death.

The difference is not academic. Because tax values tend to rise with revaluations, the value from two years earlier is normally lower, which inflates the gain and the tax. Anyone following the wrong rule overpays.

The acquisition date is the death, not the partition

The second piece is the date.

Point p) of n.º 1 of article 5.º of the stamp duty code is explicit: in successions by death, the tax obligation is considered to arise on the date the succession opens³. And the succession opens at the moment of death, as article 2031.º of the Civil Code provides.

That is why the acquisition date of an inherited property is the date of death, and not the date of the partition deed, which can happen five or ten years later. The partition merely turns into specific assets a right the heir already held from day one. The Portuguese chartered accountants’ body says the same in its technical opinion on inherited property: the moment of acquisition by succession is the opening of the estate⁸.

Nor is it the date the deceased bought the house. That date belongs to the history of the house, not to your acquisition.

The calculation, start to finish

With the value and the date settled, the rest follows the ordinary property rules.

First, inflation is corrected. Article 50.º requires a currency devaluation coefficient, published by portaria and keyed to the year of acquisition, provided more than 24 months separate acquisition from sale. Since your acquisition is the death, it is the year of death that governs. For 2025 sales, Portaria 382/2025/1 applies: a death in 2010, for example, carries a coefficient of 1.28.

Then costs come off. Article 51.º allows improvement works carried out in the last 12 years and the necessary expenses actually incurred and inherent to the acquisition and the sale⁶. On the acquisition side that means any stamp duty paid, the deed of heirs and registration; on the sale side, the estate agent’s commission, the energy certificate and the deed. All with invoices.

Finally, half is taxed. Article 43.º, n.º 2, point b) provides that the balance of property gains is taken into account at only 50% of its value⁵. That half does not pay a flat rate: it is compulsorily aggregated, which means it is added to your other income and pays whatever marginal rate results, running in 2026 from 12.5% to 48%. That is why the rate is a field you fill in on the calculator rather than a number we could guess for you.

One pleasant consequence of this mechanics: because only half is taxed, the effective rate on the gain is always half your marginal rate. Someone in the 34.9% band pays, in practice, 17.45% of the gain.

A worked example

Two siblings inherit their mother’s house after she dies in 2010, when the property’s tax value was €80,000. They now sell it for €200,000 and each paid €5,000 in agent’s commission, energy certificate and inheritance paperwork. Each has a marginal rate of 34.9%.

Each sibling holds 50%, so each is attributed:

• Sale value: €100,000
• Acquisition value: €40,000, which the 2010 coefficient lifts to €51,200
• Gain: €100,000 less €51,200 less €5,000, that is €43,800
• Taxable half: €21,900
• Tax: €7,643.10, leaving €36,156.90 of net gain

Had they instead followed the gift rule and used a tax value from two years earlier, say €65,000, each acquisition value would fall to €41,600, the gain would rise to €53,400 and the tax to €9,318.30. That is €1,675.20 more per sibling, from applying the wrong provision.

And had the mother died in 1985, the same sale would pay no income tax at all, as the next section explains.

The 1989 cut-off

Article 5.º of Decreto-Lei 442-A/88, which enacted the income tax code, carries a transitional rule that still resolves many cases today: gains that were not subject to the old 1965 capital gains tax become subject to income tax only if the acquisition of the assets took place after the Code came into force⁷, that is after 1 January 1989.

Put that together with the acquisition-date rule and the result is direct: if the death happened before 1989, today’s sale pays no income tax, however large the gain. If the death happened after, it pays, even if the house has been in the family since 1950.

Two important notes. First, the exclusion covers housing and urban buildings generally but not building land, which was already subject to the 1965 tax. Second, the exclusion does not remove the filing obligation: the sale is reported in annex G1, and n.º 2 of that same article 5.º places the burden of proving the acquisition date on the taxpayer.

When there are several heirs

A house inherited by three siblings produces three gains, not one. Each heir computes theirs in proportion to the share held and declares it on their own return, with the costs they actually paid.

The case to watch is successive inheritances. If you inherited half the house from your father in 1995 and the other half from your mother in 2018, you hold two acquisitions, with different dates and different tax values, and therefore different coefficients. Each half is computed on its own and the results are added.

Also outside this calculation are balancing payments: if the partition left you with the whole house against paying the other heirs the value of their shares, that bought portion is an onerous acquisition, with its own date and its own value, not a gratuitous one.

The open question: selling the share

There is a live dispute in the courts worth knowing about before signing anything.

In 2025 the Supreme Administrative Court issued uniformising acórdão 7/2025, holding that disposing of a hereditary share, that is the quota an heir holds over the estate as a whole while it remains undivided, is not the onerous disposal of a real right over immovable property and therefore produces no taxable gain. The reasoning is that, until the estate is partitioned, no heir owns any specific thing.

The tax authority did not accept that reading. In a binding ruling of March 2026 it argued that where what is at stake is the sale of a specific property within an undivided estate, a determinate asset is being disposed of and tax is due. On 26 February 2026 the South Central Administrative Court decided the same way.

This calculator and this guide deal with the common and clearly taxable case: the heirs sell the property. If you are weighing up selling the share itself, the way the transaction is documented may determine whether there is tax, and the law is not settled. It is one of the few tax topics where it is genuinely worth speaking to a lawyer or a chartered accountant before booking the deed.