Clinical-risk pregnancy benefit: Portugal’s high-risk pregnancy pay

Two identical absences, two diplomas, roughly twice the money

A worker is prevented from working for a month. If the absence is certified as ordinary illness, Social Security pays nothing for the first three days and pays the rest at 55 % of the reference remuneration. If it is certified as clinical risk during pregnancy, it pays every day at 100 %. On a 1,200 € salary, that is 594.00 € in one case and 1,200.00 € in the other.

The difference is not an uplift you apply for, nor a band you reach with time. It is that the legislator put the two situations in different regimes. Ordinary sick leave is the sickness benefit, governed by Decree-Law 28/2004. A high-risk pregnancy is the clinical-risk pregnancy benefit, and it lives in the social-protection-in-parenthood chapter, Decree-Law 91/2009¹, next to the parental benefit and the father’s exclusive leave.

The percentage: one sentence, no bands

Article 29 settles the amount in a single sentence: the daily amount of the benefits for clinical risk during pregnancy and for termination of pregnancy is equal to 100 % of the beneficiary reference remuneration¹.

Note what that sentence does not contain. No duration bands, unlike article 16 of the sickness regime, which raises the percentage as the leave lengthens. No uplift conditioned on income or on the number of children, unlike article 17 of that same regime. And no distinction between the two situations it names: clinical risk and termination of pregnancy are paid at exactly the same rate.

Nor is it a percentage of the salary, and that distinction matters. It is a percentage of the reference remuneration, which article 28(1) defines as R/180, R being the total of the earnings registered in the first six calendar months preceding the second month before the date of the protected event¹. Because those six months of earnings exclude the holiday and Christmas bonuses, on a stable salary the sum simplifies: six salaries divided by 180 days give the monthly salary divided by 30. It is the same base the parental and sickness benefits use, and it is why you do not multiply by fourteen months.

The first day: the quiet half of the gap

The percentage explains almost double the value per day. The rest comes from an article nobody quotes.

Article 39 says that the benefits of that chapter start on the 1st day of impediment to work for which no pay is due¹. There is no waiting period. None.

Under the sickness benefit there are three initial days that Social Security does not pay and the worker absorbs. Those three days do not disappear from the leave: they count towards the duration and the band, but they are not paid, except in cases of hospitalisation, day surgery, tuberculosis or a contagious disease. Over a thirty-day absence, that is the difference between thirty paid days and twenty-seven.

Put the two pieces together and the arithmetic closes. A 1,200 € salary gives a daily reference remuneration of 40.00 €. Clinical risk pays 40.00 € for thirty days, that is 1,200.00 €. Ordinary illness pays 22.00 € for twenty-seven days, that is 594.00 €. The 606.00 € gap is 606 € of income that depends only on the legal basis on which the absence was certified.

The daily floor, and where it bites

Both regimes have a minimum daily amount, and they are built from the same ingredients.

Article 38(1) of Decree-Law 91/2009 says the minimum daily amount of the benefits of that chapter may not be lower than 80 % of one thirtieth of the IAS¹. With the social support index at 537.13 € in 2026, that comes to 14.32 € a day. The sickness benefit uses the same structure with 30 % instead of 80 %, that is 5.37 €.

The floor is not decorative. A daily reference remuneration of 13.33 €, which corresponds to a 400 € salary, would produce 13.33 € of benefit at 100 %; the floor lifts it to 14.32 €. On higher salaries it never bites, because 100 % of a reference remuneration above 14.32 € is always larger than the minimum.

Worth adding what the floor does not do: it does not create a right. With no registered earnings there is no benefit at all, and it is article 25(1) that decides this, requiring six calendar months, consecutive or not, with registered earnings at the date of the protected event¹. Paragraph 2 allows the month of the event itself to count if there are earnings in it, and paragraph 3 adds that where there are six consecutive months without earnings the qualifying count restarts from a new registration.

Duration: open in one case, closed in the other

The two situations that article 29 pays at the same rate have opposite duration rules, and that is where the comparison between them stops being symmetric.

For clinical risk, article 9 grants the benefit where a clinical risk to the pregnant worker or to the unborn child is medically certified and prevents the exercise of work, for the period of time considered necessary to prevent the risk¹. The law sets no limit. It can be a week, it can be months, it can run until the initial parental leave begins, and the medical certificate decides.

For a termination of pregnancy, article 10 does the opposite: it grants the benefit in situations of termination of pregnancy preventing the exercise of work, medically certified, for a variable period of between 14 and 30 days¹. The window is closed at both ends.

What stays outside, and what changes at the end of 2026

Three limits are worth stating, because they are where wrong sums usually come from.

The first is accumulation. Article 42 provides that the benefits of that chapter cannot be drawn together with employment income, and the two exceptions Decree-Law 53/2023 left in it² concern the initial parental leave and part-time extended parental leave, not this benefit. Article 43 rules out accumulation with other benefits compensating a loss of pay, except invalidity, old-age and survivor pensions, and expressly allows it with the social insertion income and the old-age solidarity supplement.

The second is fiscal, and it is favourable: these benefits carry no Social Security contributions and no income tax, so the figures calculated are net. Comparing 100 % of a net reference remuneration with a gross salary understates the weight of the benefit.

The third is a change already published that takes effect at the end of this year. Decree-Law 166/2026 of 13 August, which creates the Prestação Social Única, repealed in point k) of its article 62 chapter iii of Decree-Law 91/2009³. That chapter is where the social parenthood benefits live, the ones for people who do not meet the qualifying period, among them the social clinical-risk benefit and the social termination benefit. From 31 December 2026 they are claimed as the Prestação Social Única, and article 62(2) guarantees the continuity of the right to those benefits until the end of the granting period for anyone already receiving them. The contributory benefits, the ones in this article and the ones the calculator works out, are not touched.

A note on the wording used

Article 29 is quoted here from the original publication of Decree-Law 91/2009 in the Diário da República¹, and there is reason to treat that wording as the one in force. Article 5 of Decree-Law 53/2023, which is the seventh amendment to the diploma and the largest reform of the regime since 2009, lists the articles it replaces, 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 30, 32, 33, 34, 38, 41 and 42, and article 29 is not on that list². Article 51 of Decree-Law 166/2026, the tenth amendment, replaces only articles 1, 63 and 64³. The eighth and ninth amendments were not readable from the sources used for this article, and we say so rather than implying otherwise: 100 % is the highest figure the law can set, but an official consolidation is the only place where the wording of every article is confirmed at once.