Portugal's National Incapacity Table: how to read it and how injuries combine

What the National Incapacity Table is

Portugal's National Incapacity Table, the TNI, from its Portuguese name Tabela Nacional de Incapacidades, is Annex I to Decree-Law 352/2007 of 23 October¹. It is a list of several hundred sequelae, organised by chapters of the human body, and it matches each one with a coefficient: a percentage of the earning capacity the injury takes away.

It matters to understand what the table measures. It does not measure pain, or clinical severity, or the cost of treatment. It measures lost earning capacity, which is why the same injury can attract different coefficients depending on the applicable chapter and the circumstances of the case. The coefficient 1.00 corresponds to total dysfunction, which the General Instructions define as absolute permanent incapacity for any work whatsoever¹.

Ahead of the list sit the General Instructions, and that is where the part almost nobody reads, the part that decides the result, is found: the rules that say how coefficients combine where there is more than one injury.

The rule that matters: coefficients are not added

Anyone leaving a medical board with three coefficients in the report instinctively does the wrong arithmetic. If the sequelae are worth 30%, 30% and 30%, the sum is 90%, and that is not the degree.

Point 5(d) of the General Instructions requires the partial coefficients to be combined

according to the residual-capacity principle, the first being calculated against the capacity prior to the accident or disease and the following ones against the residual capacity, with successive deduction of the coefficients already counted

In plain words: the first coefficient bites on the whole capacity; the second bites only on what is left; the third only on what is left after that. The logic is obvious once you see it: the same capacity cannot be lost twice.

Two consequences of this rule are worth holding on to, because they answer frequent questions.

The first: a set of coefficients all below 100% never reaches 100%. However many injuries accumulate, the global degree approaches unity without meeting it. Only a coefficient that on its own amounts to total dysfunction takes the global degree to 100% by this route.

The second: the order does not count. The calculation is a product of the capacities that successively remain, and a product does not change with the order of its factors. Starting from the most severe injury or from the mildest gives exactly the same global degree, so the order in which the examiner lists the sequelae in the report is not a ground for disputing the figure.

You can combine the coefficients from your own report in the incapacity degree calculator, which applies this rule and shows alongside it how much the arithmetic sum would overstate.

The 1.5 uplift, and why it applies only once

Once the global degree is fixed, the law provides for an increase. Point 5(a) writes the formula out in full, "IG + (IG × 0.5)", a multiplication by 1.5, and applies it "up to the limit of unity" where the worker¹

• cannot be redeployed in relation to the post, or
• is aged 50 or over.

Point 5(b) grants the same factor where the injury entails a visible change in physical appearance that materially affects performance in the post, and closes by stating that it "is not cumulative with the preceding paragraph". Add the condition point 5(a) carries itself ("where they have not benefited from the application of that factor") and the practical conclusion follows: the grounds are alternatives. There is at most one 1.5 factor, never two.

One detail changes the result: the statutory formula is written on IG, the already combined global degree, not on each coefficient before combining. The difference is not small. With our three 30% sequelae, uplifting the global degree gives 98.55%; uplifting each coefficient and only then combining them would give 83.36%. The order of operations the law chose is the one that favours the worker.

Above 66.67% the uplift stops paying

Because the factor is 1.5 and the cap is unity, the uplift saturates at exactly 1 ÷ 1.5 = 66.67%. From that global degree upwards the factor adds nothing:

The uplift is worth a great deal in the middle band and nothing at the top. It is worth noting that reaching the coefficient 1.00 by this route is an arithmetic fact about the coefficient; classifying the situation as absolute permanent incapacity for any work whatsoever, with the distinct benefits that entails, is for the multidisciplinary board provided for in point 5-A and, in a dispute, for the labour court.

What the degree decides

The degree is not a number for the file: it is what determines the money.

In a partial permanent incapacity, article 48(3)(c) of Law 98/2009 gives a lifelong annual pension of 70% of the reduction suffered in general earning capacity, computed on the gross annual earnings and paid in 14 instalments². Each point of the degree is therefore worth 0.7% of the annual earnings. That is the calculation the work accident compensation calculator sets out in detail.

At the first medical examination there is a further rule of its own, in point 9 of the General Instructions: temporary partial incapacity is then set at "at least double" the coefficient foreseeable for the future permanent incapacity, without passing the coefficient 1¹. It is a floor, not a value.

Outside employment law, the degree opens doors. From 60% permanent incapacity, article 87(5) of the Personal Income Tax Code treats the person as a person with a disability for tax purposes³, provided the degree is certified by a multi-purpose medical incapacity certificate. That certificate is assessed against the same table, but it follows its own process before the incapacity assessment board, and it does not follow automatically from a degree fixed in a work-accident case.

An injury predating the accident is not deducted

This is one of the most misunderstood rules, and it is generous to the worker. Where the injury resulting from the accident is aggravated by a pre-existing injury or illness, or where the accident aggravates the earlier injury, article 11(2) of Law 98/2009 requires that

the incapacity shall be assessed as though everything resulted from it

that is, the earlier share is not deducted². There is a single exception: where the worker already draws a pension for that earlier injury or illness, or has already received a lump-sum commutation under the same law.

There is a detail here worth knowing, because it causes confusion when the table is read directly. Point 5(e) of the General Instructions refers, in these cases, to "article 9(2) of Law 100/97"¹. That law was repealed by article 186(a) of Law 98/2009², so the table in force today points at an instrument that no longer exists. The live rule is article 11(2), and its content is the same.

Two tables in one decree, with opposite rules

Decree-Law 352/2007 publishes two tables, and using the wrong one is precisely the error the decree was enacted to fix.

Annex II has a preference order of its own: it directly adds synergistic sequelae, that is, those whose effects aggravate each other; it asks the examiner for the score equivalent to the global loss where they are not synergistic; and it falls back on "the residual-capacity calculation (Balthazard rule)" only where neither of those is possible¹.

That clears up a frequent terminological doubt: residual capacity and the Balthazard rule are the same mechanism under two names. Annex I never names Balthazard, even though it makes the rule its general principle; Annex II names it, but only for the residual case.

The decree's own preamble is explicit about the risk of swapping the tables: it says that the practice of using the employment table in other areas of law is "potentially productive of significant injustice"¹, and Annex II was published precisely to correct it.

When the general rule does not apply

Point 5(d) reserves, in its own text, that "a special rule expressly stated in this table prevails over the rule laid down in this paragraph"¹, and the table uses that power. The clearest case is point 8.3, on ankylosis of the fingers, where the table states in terms that the values of the partial incapacities "are added arithmetically, and not according to the residual-capacity principle".

There are two further points at which the table expressly hands the decision to the examiner. Points 6 and 7 of the General Instructions allow them to move within the range provided for the sequela according to the case, and to take account of factors such as the occupation exercised. The coefficient is therefore not a mechanical reading of a line in the table.

This table decides very concrete amounts from a calculation almost nobody does the way the law requires. The coefficients come from the medical report and are not arguable with a calculator, but the way they combine is in the statute, it is verifiable, and it is where the difference between 65.70% and 90% appears.