How Portugal updates pensions every year, and why yours may rise less

There is no single pension increase. There are three

The December headline always carries one percentage, and it is always the highest one. The portaria carries three, and which of them applies to you depends on the pension you already receive. Article 2(1) of Portaria n.º 480-B/2025/1 says, word for word: 2.80% for pensions equal to or below 1074.26 EUR; 2.27% for pensions above 1074.26 EUR and equal to or below 3222.78 EUR; 2.02% for pensions above 3222.78 EUR¹.

Note how each boundary is worded, inclusive on one side and exclusive on the other: a pension of exactly 1,074.26 EUR is still in the first band and receives 2.80%.

The three figures are not round numbers by accident. They are multiples of the indexante dos apoios sociais, which Portaria n.º 480-A/2025/1 set at 537.13 EUR for 2026²:

This covers old-age and disability pensions from the general Social Security regime and the retirement, reform and disability pensions paid by the Caixa Geral de Aposentações, which the portaria treats together in the same article.

The detail almost nobody mentions: there is a minimum increase in euros

Right after the rates, article 3 sets a floor on the update itself. The update of pensions in the 2.27% band may not be lower than 30.08 EUR, and the update in the 2.02% band may not be lower than 73.16 EUR¹.

It is worth stopping here and doing the arithmetic the legislator did, because it explains everything else.

• 2.80%, the rate of the FIRST band, applied to the 1,074.26 EUR boundary, gives 30.08 EUR.
• 2.27%, the rate of the SECOND band, applied to the 3,222.78 EUR boundary, gives 73.16 EUR.

Each floor is the previous band rate measured exactly at the boundary. That is not a coincidence, it is a mechanism, and it exists to remove a step. Without it, somebody one cent above 1,074.26 EUR would receive an increase of 24.39 EUR while a neighbour exactly on the boundary received 30.08 EUR: crossing a band would LOSE them almost six euros a month.

With the floor that does not happen, and the effect reaches well beyond the boundary. The floor keeps beating the rate up to a pension of 1,325.11 EUR in the second band and up to 3,621.78 EUR in the third. Inside that range, your effective increase is larger than your band rate.

There is a third floor of 9.29 EUR in the first band, but that one is arithmetically inert: it is exactly 2.80% of 331.79 EUR, the amount from which the article makes it apply, so the percentage never falls below it.

The one real step is at the top

If the portaria took the trouble to smooth the two rate boundaries, the contrast with the third one is stark. Article 2(2) says pensions above 6445.56 EUR are not updated¹, and there is no floor here to soften the crossing.

One cent of pension costs 130.20 EUR a month, that is 1,822.80 EUR across the fourteen payments of the year. And the effect does not stop with the year: the frozen pension enters the next January on a lower base, so the gap carries into every year that follows.

The portaria reserves two exceptions, which depend on the individual situation and which this page names rather than ignores: the situations in article 102 of Decreto-Lei n.º 187/2007 and in article 7(2) of Lei n.º 52/2007¹.

Fourteen payments, not twelve

Turning the monthly increase into a yearly gain involves a choice that changes the answer by almost 17%, and the portaria settles it expressly. Article 22 says the additional amounts of the Social Security pensions paid in July and December are worth the same as the pension resulting from the update set by the portaria, and article 23 guarantees pensioners of the Caixa Geral de Aposentações a fourteenth month paid in July, equal to the pension they receive that month¹.

So the additional amounts track the pension. The gain for the year is fourteen times the monthly increase. On an increase of 30.08 EUR a month, counting twelve instead of fourteen hides 60.16 EUR a year.

CGA survivor pensions have a different table

This is the easiest confusion to fall into, because the rates are the same and the boundaries are not. Article 7 covers survivor pensions, blood-price pensions and others paid by the CGA, and applies 2.80% up to 537.13 EUR, 2.27% above that and up to 1,611.39 EUR, and 2.02% above 1,611.39 EUR¹. That is one and three times the index, against the two and six times of article 2.

A pension of 900 EUR falls in the first band under article 2 and in the second under article 7: 25.20 EUR in one case, 20.43 EUR in the other.

Article 8 gives this table the same anti-step floors, 15.04 EUR and 36.58 EUR, and the identity repeats to the cent: 2.80% of 537.13 EUR is 15.04 EUR and 2.27% of 1,611.39 EUR is 36.58 EUR.

One difference worth keeping: the freeze above twelve times the index is written in article 2 and is not repeated in article 7.

General-regime survivor pensions follow a third path

Neither the article 2 table nor the article 7 one. Article 6 says general-regime survivor pensions that started before 1 January 2026 are updated by applying their own calculation percentages to the invalidity and old-age pensions that serve as their base, and to the social supplement where applicable, at the value both take after the update rules of this diploma¹.

In plain terms: the base pension is what gets updated, and the survivor pension follows in proportion to the holder's share, which is 60% with a single beneficiary and 70% when there are several. So anyone receiving a general-regime survivor pension should start by updating the base pension and only then apply their percentage.

The career floor, which can be worth more than the rate

After the rate there is still a guaranteed minimum, and it depends on the length of the career or service.

Note that the article 9 table is exactly half of the article 5 one, value by value, which is the 50% share of a surviving spouse.

If the updated pension lands below the minimum for your career, it is raised to it. One exception is worth knowing: article 4(3)(b) excludes from these minimums the pensions brought forward under the flexible old-age retirement regimes¹.

Where the rates come from

The portaria does not invent the numbers, it applies two indicators, and the preamble names them. The update takes as reference indicators the real growth of gross domestic product, measured as the average annual growth over the last two years ending in the third quarter of the year before the update, and the twelve-month average change of the consumer price index excluding housing available in December of the preceding year¹.

For 2026 the preamble publishes both: average GDP growth over the two years to the third quarter of 2025 was 2.12% and the average change of the CPI excluding housing available in December 2025 was 2.27%.

Note the arithmetic coincidence: the second band rate is exactly the CPI figure, the first sits above it and the third below it. The rules that connect the indicators to each band live in articles 4 to 7-A of Lei n.º 53-B/2006, which the portaria cites as its legal basis.

What the portaria fixes instead of updating

Not everything rises by a percentage. In several regimes the portaria sets the amount for the year, and that is what changes in January:

• Special regime for agricultural activities: 314.85 EUR (art. 14).
• Non-contributory regime and the transitional agricultural regimes: 262.40 EUR (arts. 16, 18 and 19).
• Provisional disability pension: 262.40 EUR (art. 13).
• Dependency supplement: 131.20 EUR for the first degree and 236.16 EUR for the second in the general regime; 118.08 EUR and 223.04 EUR in the agricultural, non-contributory and equivalent regimes (art. 24).
• Dependent-spouse pension supplement: 47.92 EUR (art. 25).
• Extraordinary solidarity supplement: 22.83 EUR below age 70 and 45.67 EUR from that age (art. 26).

What is out of scope

The figures on this page are gross, that is before income tax. A pension is subject to withholding under the tables that apply to pensioners, and a pension that rises can move into a different withholding band, so the net increase can be smaller than the gross one.

Also out of scope is the coefficient table of article 21, which updates the contributory share of pensions in cumulation rather than the amount received each month. And so are the groups that article 1(2) expressly excludes from the update, among them the beneficiaries of the extinct Caixa de Previdência dos Empregados do Banco de Angola and those covered by the special regulations of railway workers and of the staff of the Porto public transport service.