Porta 65 Jovem: Portugal's youth rent subsidy

A percentage of the rent, not a fixed amount

Porta 65 Jovem has existed since 2007 and the idea has never changed: the State pays part of the rent of someone aged 18 to 35 who rents a home as a permanent residence. What did change, and changed considerably in 2024, is how that part is worked out.

Art. 2.º(1) of Portaria n.º 277-A/2010 says the support is granted as a monthly subsidy that is not reimbursable. It is not a loan, it is not repaid, and it does not depend on the landlord doing anything in particular. Paragraph 4 adds that the subsidy is paid 12 times a year, by the 8th of each month, which means there is no thirteenth or fourteenth payment: twelve instalments per year of support.

The sum itself is in paragraph 2 of the same article, in the wording Portaria n.º 238/2024/1 gave it, and it is worth reading in full because everything else follows from it:

No caso do Porta 65 Jovem, a subvenção mensal é calculada mediante a aplicação das percentagens estabelecidas no quadro i anexo à presente portaria ao menor valor entre o valor da renda máxima de referência e o valor da renda paga pelos beneficiários, de acordo com a pontuação atribuída à candidatura nos termos do quadro v anexo à presente portaria.

There are three steps, in this order. First the score is worked out under Quadro V. Then the score converts into a band under Quadro I, and each band carries three percentages. Finally the percentage is applied to a base, which is the lower of the rent you pay and the reference rent for your typology in your municipality.

The ceiling that arrived in 2024, and that almost nobody explains

That phrase «ao menor valor entre», the lower of the two, is the most important point in this article, because it is new and because it changes the final number for a great many people.

The previous wording, given by Portaria n.º 346-A/2023 of 10 November, applied the percentages to the rent paid by the beneficiaries. Full stop. There was no ceiling: anyone paying a high rent received a percentage of that high rent. Portaria n.º 238/2024/1 added the comparison with the reference rent, and the lower of the two now governs.

In practice that means the part of the rent above the municipality's reference is not subsidised at all. A one-bedroom flat in Lisbon has, in 2026, a reference rent of 1,006 €. Someone paying 800 € has the sum done on 800 €. Someone paying 1,200 € has it done on 1,006 €, and the remaining 194 € falls entirely to them, on top of the part of the rent the percentage does not cover.

There is a counterweight, and it is also from 2024. Previously a rent above the limit did not merely cap the amount: it barred the application itself. Decreto-Lei n.º 42/2024 of 2 July revoked art. 7.º(2)(a) and (b) of Decreto-Lei n.º 308/2007, which were precisely the provisions excluding those cases. So a high rent stopped excluding and began merely limiting. Someone who previously could not even apply can apply today, but receives on the reference rather than on what they pay.

Quadro I: the percentages fall with time, not with income

Quadro I is a table of three rows and three columns. The rows are scoring bands and the columns are instalments already received.

The commonest misreading is to take the columns for income bands. They are not: they are time. The same person, with the same income and the same score, is paid at 50 % in the first year of support, 35 % in the second and 25 % from the third to the fifth, if they sit in the top band. And because each approved application is worth twelve months and the support lasts five years at most, sixty instalments are precisely the end of the line.

That has a practical consequence worth planning for: the figure you count on in the first year is not the figure you can count on in the third. On a base of 800 €, the top band pays 400 € a month in the first year and 200 € a month from the third.

One cell of the table is misprinted in the Diário da República

This is better said than hidden. In the third band cell for the column «> 12 e ≤ 24 prestações», the Diário da República prints 2, and it prints it in both Portaria n.º 346-A/2023 and Portaria n.º 238/2024/1. This is not a text-extraction problem: we went and looked at the rendered page image of both publications, and what is there is a 2.

The original 2010 text prints 20 in that same cell. And 20 is the only value consistent with the rest of the table, for two independent reasons. First, in every other row the three columns fall throughout, 50, 35 and 25 in one and 40, 30 and 20 in the other, and a 2 would sit below the 10 of the next column, breaking the order within its own row. Second, the columns also fall from top to bottom, 35, 30 and then 20, and a 2 would be a jump with no parallel anywhere in the table.

We conclude, therefore, that the error entered at the 2023 republication and was carried into 2024, and we use 20. Publishing the literal 2 would understate a housing benefit tenfold; using 20 without explaining why we diverge from the official text would be worse still.

Quadro V: the four criteria that produce the points

The score decides the band, and it is arithmetic. Four criteria, 240 points at most.

A, household size and composition, up to 90 points. The formula is written like this:

A = 1 + 0,7 x (número de candidatos − 1) + 0,25 × (número de dependentes) + 0,25 × [número de portadores de deficiência ≥ 60 %] + 0,25 × (número de dependentes em situação de monoparentalidade)

If A reaches 3, that is 90 points. Below that it is A × 30, which gives between 30 and 90. A person living alone has A = 1 and takes 30 points. A couple with two dependants has A = 2.2 and takes 66. Reaching 90 is hard: for a couple, A = 3 takes more than nine dependants.

B, proportionality of the effort rate, up to 90 points. It is the real effort rate divided by the maximum effort rate, all multiplied by 90. The real effort rate is the weight of the rent in the household's income. This is the criterion that moves the score most, and it moves in a direction that surprises people: the heavier the rent is in your budget, the more points you get, because the programme is meant to support those under most pressure.

C, monthly income, up to 30 points. Measured in multiples of the reference rent: 30 points below 2.5 times, 20 points between 2.5 and 3.5, and 10 points between 3.5 and 4. Above four times there are no points at all, and no support at all, for the reason in the next section.

D, proportionality of the rent, up to 30 points. It measures the rent you pay against the reference. Up to 50 % of the reference, 30 points. Above that the formula is «[1 − (VRRM/RMA)] × 30 × 2», which gives exactly 30 at 50 % and falls to zero when the rent equals the reference.

Criterion E was revoked, and the arithmetic proves it

You will still find, in many places, a fifth criterion scoring the ascendants' financial situation, worth 50 points where they receive the minimum-income benefit and 20 points where their income is up to three minimum wages. It was revoked: on the criterion E line, Portaria n.º 238/2024/1 writes only «(Revogado.)».

What confirms the reading, and is rather elegant, is that the same regulation lowered the top band ceiling from «≥ 120 e ≤ 290» to «≥ 120 e ≤ 240». Two hundred and ninety minus the fifty that criterion E could be worth is exactly 240, and 240 is precisely the sum of the four criteria that remain: 90 plus 90 plus 30 plus 30. The two changes are the same change, and any source still listing criterion E is describing the regime as it stood before October 2024.

Who can apply, and what excludes

The ages are in art. 4.º(1) of Decreto-Lei n.º 308/2007, in the 2024 wording: young people aged 18 to 35; couples of young people, not judicially separated or in a de facto union, resident in the rented home, in the same range, with one member allowed to be up to 37; and young people sharing a home as their permanent residence, aged 18 to 35. Paragraph 3 adds that someone turning 36 during the support may still apply for one further, consecutive application.

The income limit is in paragraph 1(d) of art. 7.º and is short to state: the young household's income may not be more than four times the reference rent. Note that this is the same ceiling where criterion C stops, at «≥ 3,5 RMA e ≤ 4 RMA»: the two provisions are the same boundary seen from two sides.

Beyond that, and the calculation does not check any of this, you must not be accumulating another public housing support, no member of the household may own or rent another home, none may be related to the landlord, and the tax and social-security position must be regularised.

Then there is the typology. Quadro III sets the largest home considered adequate for each household: up to two people, a two-bedroom flat; three people, three bedrooms; four, four; five, five; six or more, six. This is where the classified areas come in, and not where most of the published information puts them: art. 5.º admits, in historic or old urban areas, in urban-rehabilitation areas and in critical areas of urban recovery and reconversion, homes of a larger typology than Quadro III allows, provided their floor area stays within the limits of Portaria n.º 500/97. They widen the home, not the support.

The figure we could not read in the diploma

There is one value in this sum that does not come from a primary source, and we say so rather than passing over it. The footnote to Quadro V refers the maximum effort rate, criterion B's TEM, to art. 7.º(1)(e) of Decreto-Lei n.º 308/2007. That decree is from 2007, which pre-dates the Diário da República PDF scheme, and its consolidated text does not open by any of the routes we tried.

The IHRU publishes the maximum effort rate as 60 %. It is a figure coherent with what can be read: because access requires a real effort rate at or below the maximum, criterion B, which is «(TER/TEM) x 90», can never exceed the 90 points Quadro V itself caps it at. So the calculator carries 60 % as an editable default rather than hiding it in a constant.

What the sum does not decide

The most important limitation of Porta 65 Jovem is not in the formula, it is in the budget. Art. 6.º(4) says applications are approved according to the criteria in art. 7.º, up to the limit of the annual budget.

That means the Quadro V score does two jobs at once. It sets the percentage you receive, and that is what the calculator can state precisely. But it also ranks candidates against each other, and there the outcome depends on the money available that year and on how many people applied, which nobody knows in advance. The same number of points can be enough in one application window and not in the next.

That is why the calculator shows all three bands side by side, and not only the one your score falls into. The spread between them is wide: on a base of 800 €, the first year pays 400 €, 320 € or 240 € a month depending on the band.

An example from start to finish

A young woman living alone rents a one-bedroom flat in Lisbon for 800 € a month, with a monthly income of 1,400 €.

The reference rent for a one-bedroom flat in Lisbon in 2026 is 1,006 €. Since she pays 800 €, the base is 800 €, and none of the rent falls outside the support.

The points: on criterion A she is alone, A = 1, so 30 points. On criterion B her real effort rate is 57.14 %, which against a 60 % maximum gives 85.71 points. On criterion C the 1,400 € is 1.39 times the reference, below 2.5, so 30 points. On criterion D the rent is 79.52 % of the reference, so 12.29 points. That totals 158 points, above 120, therefore the top band.

On the first application the percentage is 50 %: she receives 400 € a month and 4,800 € over the year, and the rent to her own account falls from 800 € to 400 €. On the second application it drops to 35 %, so 280 € a month. From the third to the fifth it drops to 25 %, so 200 € a month.

Had the same flat cost 1,200 €, the sum would not be done on 1,200 €. The base would be held at the 1,006 € reference, the first-year support would be 503 € a month, and 194 € of rent would fall entirely outside the programme.

Where to find your municipality's figures

The reference rent is not national. The IHRU publishes it every year in a single file, municipality by municipality and by typology, under the title «Renda Máxima Admitida». In 2026 the 308 municipalities range from 351 € for a studio inland to 1,900 € for a five-bedroom flat in Lisbon, and neighbouring municipalities can carry very different figures.

The Porta 65 Jovem calculator carries that whole table, so picking the municipality and the typology is enough to see the applicable reference and the subsidy that follows from it. If you are comparing homes in different municipalities, that is where the difference shows up fastest.