The habitation licence, called the licença de utilização in Portuguese, records what a building is legally authorised to be. The licence does not record what the building is. Decreto-Lei n.º 10/2024, de 8 de janeiro (DL 10/2024) removed the licence as a checkpoint at the deed from 1 January 2024, so no public official now compares the authorised property against the physical one before a sale completes. A buyer who signs on a licence that describes a different building inherits the difference. Unauthorised works carry fines from €498.80 to €99,759.58 for individuals and up to €249,398.95 for companies under the Regime Jurídico da Urbanização e Edificação, and the obligation follows the property rather than the person who created it. An InspectOS Simplex Safe inspection compares the licence, the registry and the tax record against what a certified engineer measures on site.
Table of Contents
- What is the habitation licence in Portugal, and what does it prove?
- Why does the licence matter more since January 2024?
- How do you check the licence against the building in one afternoon?
- What happens when the areas do not match?
- Is a pre-1951 building really exempt?
- What changes on 1 October 2026?
- What does it cost to be wrong?
- Which buildings fail this check most often?
- How an inspection closes the gap between the licence and the building
- Frequently Asked Questions
What is the habitation licence in Portugal, and what does it prove?
The habitation licence records the use a Portuguese municipality authorised for a building, and proves authorisation on paper rather than physical condition.
A Câmara Municipal issues the document at the end of a construction or alteration process. It names the building, names the authorised use, and where the use is housing it names the number of dwellings and their layout. Portuguese sellers, agents and lawyers call it the licença de utilização. Older documents carry the wording licença de habitação, and the current official designation under the Regime Jurídico da Urbanização e Edificação (RJUE, Decreto-Lei n.º 555/99, de 16 de dezembro) is autorização de utilização. All three describe the same municipal act. What matters is the use written on the face of it and the version of the building it describes.
The licence is one of the seller's mandatory pre-sale documents, alongside the Caderneta Predial Urbana held by the Autoridade Tributária, the Certidão Permanente do Registo Predial held by the Conservatória do Registo Predial, and the Certificado Energético. The four documents are the paper description of a property. Our property due diligence guide for Portugal covers the full document set and where each one is obtained.
This article covers the part the document set cannot answer. A licence issued in 1994 describes a building as it stood in 1994. Every wall moved, every terrace enclosed and every attic converted since then sits outside it, and none of those changes announce themselves on the paperwork. The gap between the authorised building and the standing building is what a buyer inherits at the deed.
Why does the licence matter more since January 2024?
Decreto-Lei n.º 10/2024 removed the habitation licence as a deed requirement on 1 January 2024, ending the last automatic public check before sale.
Before that date, a Portuguese notary could not complete an escritura on an urban property without the seller presenting a valid licence. The requirement was crude, because a notary reads documents rather than buildings, but it forced the paperwork to exist and to be looked at by someone outside the transaction.
DL 10/2024 removed the licence from the deed and removed the Ficha Técnica da Habitação with it. Urban planning legality became external to the transaction. The notary now confirms identity, capacity and that IMT and Imposto do Selo are settled. Nobody checks that the flat has the number of bedrooms the licence authorises. The full mechanics of that change sit in our Simplex Urbanístico guide.
Two consequences follow, and both land on the buyer.
The licence still has to exist for the property to be lawful, financeable and resaleable. DL 10/2024 removed a gate, not an obligation. A property with no licence is no more legal than it was in 2023, and a future buyer will run into the same problem the current seller is now free to skip past.
Banks are free to ask for the licence and for the Ficha Técnica da Habitação, and many still do. Banco de Portugal has confirmed that each lender sets its own position. A property that will not produce its licence can therefore stall a mortgage months after a promissory purchase contract (CPCV, Contrato-Promessa de Compra e Venda) has already bound the deposit.
How do you check the licence against the building in one afternoon?
Three cross-checks run in a single afternoon: licence against tax record, tax record against land registry, and both against the area a buyer can measure.
The three documents describe the same property from three different institutions, and none of them guarantees the others. Run them in order.
Check one. The licence against the Caderneta Predial Urbana. Ask the seller for the licence number and its date, then read the Caderneta Predial Urbana from the Autoridade Tributária. Compare the authorised use, the number of fractions and the described layout. A licence authorising commerce on a floor that is now a two-bedroom flat is a change of use, and a change of use requires its own municipal authorisation regardless of how long ago it happened.
Check two. The Caderneta Predial against the Certidão Permanente. The tax record and the land registry are separate databases and they disagree more often than buyers expect. The Certidão Permanente do Registo Predial carries six months of validity and costs €15 online or €20 in person. Read the description, the boundaries and the registered area against the tax record. Charges, mortgages and pending registrations appear here and nowhere else.
Check three. Both records against what the property measures. Take the area figures from both documents to the viewing and measure. Enclosed balconies, converted garages, roof rooms and rear extensions are the four that most often exist in concrete and not on paper. An extra fifteen square metres of living space is a pleasant surprise until a buyer discovers it was never authorised.
The check is documentary at this stage and any buyer can run it. What it cannot do is tell you whether the unauthorised work is structurally sound, whether the beam that was removed was load-bearing, or whether the enclosed terrace drains into the flat below. That reading is technical, and it is what our pre-purchase property inspection covers.
What happens when the areas do not match?
Article 28.º-A of the Código do Registo Predial waives area harmonisation within 10% for urban property, 20% for uncadastred rural land and 5% with cadastre.
Inside those thresholds, the two records can disagree and the sale proceeds. Above them, correction becomes mandatory before a clean transfer, and the correction is a process rather than a form.
The owner commissions a topographic survey (levantamento topográfico) from a licensed engineer, architect or surveyor. The Autoridade Tributária record is rectified first, through Modelo 1 do IMI for urban property. Only once the updated Caderneta Predial exists will the Conservatória do Registo Predial accept the registry rectification, and the request usually needs a declaration from the adjoining owners (confrontantes).
That sequence runs through two agencies and takes months rather than weeks. A discrepancy found at CPCV stage can therefore delay a financed purchase past its own deadline, which is why the measurement belongs before the signature rather than after it. Our guide on inspecting a property before signing the CPCV sets out the window buyers actually have.
There is a second reading of a mismatch worth naming. An area difference is sometimes a clerical error from a 1970s registry entry. It is just as often the fingerprint of an unauthorised work, and the two look identical on paper. Only the site visit separates them.
Is a pre-1951 building really exempt?
A Portuguese building is exempt from a use licence only where construction predates 7 August 1951 and no works requiring prior municipal control have followed.
The exemption is real and it is conditional, and Portuguese sellers state the first half far more often than the second. The date is the commencement of the Regulamento Geral das Edificações Urbanas (RGEU), approved by Decreto-Lei n.º 38382, de 7 de agosto de 1951. Before it, no national use licence existed to obtain.
The condition is the part that decides most cases. Reconstruction, extension, alteration or a change of use after 1951 voids the exemption and puts the building back inside the licensing regime. Only conservation works leave it intact. A pre-war building in Lisbon or Porto that was rebuilt internally in the 1980s is not an exempt building. It is an unlicensed one.
Proving the exemption falls to the seller, who applies to the Câmara Municipal for a certidão de construção anterior a 1951. The municipality inspects before issuing, often through a comissão de vistoria, and where the inspection finds unpermitted works it refuses the certificate and opens a legalisation file instead. Sellers who know this tend to avoid asking.
Around 20% of Lisbon's buildings predate 1919 (INE, Census 2021), which makes the exemption question routine in the historic centre rather than exotic. Portugal also holds roughly 725,000 vacant properties (INE, Census 2021), and long-vacant buildings are exactly where the municipal file goes cold and the paperwork stops matching the structure.
Before the CPCV binds your deposit, an InspectOS Simplex Safe inspection compares the licence, the registry and the tax record against what a certified engineer records on site, and prices the gap while price is still negotiable. Set against RJUE exposure reaching €99,759.58 for an individual owner, the inspection is a small fraction of what it screens for.
→ Book a Simplex Safe inspection · get a quote at inspectos.pt/en/home-inspections
What changes on 1 October 2026?
Decreto-Lei n.º 108/2026, de 29 de maio enters force on 1 October 2026 and requires sale documents to state the property's urbanistic title position.
The commencement date moved. DL 108/2026 was published on 29 May 2026 and was originally set to enter force on 3 August 2026. Decreto-Lei n.º 155-B/2026, de 31 de julho gave new wording to its commencement provision and deferred entry into force to 1 October 2026. Until 30 September 2026 the RJUE applies in its earlier wording, which is the DL 10/2024 position described above. Portuguese and English commentary published before August 2026 still carries the 3 August date and is wrong.
From 1 October 2026, documents formalising the transfer of building land, of constructed or under-construction buildings and of their autonomous fractions must state the situation of the urbanistic title (título urbanístico). Three positions are distinguished: the seller presents the title, the seller declares holding it without exhibiting it in the act, or the seller declares not holding one. Omitting the mention makes the transaction anulável, meaning it produces effects but either party can contest it.
Read that carefully, because three misreadings are circulating.
The voidability attaches to leaving the mention out of the document. It does not attach to the property lacking a title. Portugal did not ban the sale of properties with irregular paperwork, it required the position to be stated.
DL 108/2026 does not create a general obligation to inspect anything. No engineer is required for the declaration to be made, and no technical examination sits behind it.
The removal of municipal verification from the deed was DL 10/2024, in force 1 January 2024, not DL 108/2026. DL 108/2026 adds a disclosure duty back. Almost every published account of this change, in both languages, has the attribution reversed.
One further correction belongs here. The RGEU has not been repealed. DL 108/2026 set its revocation to take effect only when a future technical-regulation diploma enters force, and that diploma has not been published. The RGEU remains the applicable technical standard in the meantime, alongside each municipality's own Regulamento Municipal de Urbanização e Edificação.
What does it cost to be wrong?
Unauthorised works carry RJUE fines from €498.80 to €99,759.58 for individuals and up to €249,398.95 for companies, and the exposure transfers with the property.
The fine is the visible number and rarely the largest one. Three costs sit behind it.
Legalisation, where the work can be legalised at all. The owner commissions drawings, files them with the Câmara Municipal, pays the municipal taxas set by local regulation, and waits. Cost varies by municipality and by the scale of the work, and no national figure describes it.
Correction or demolition, where it cannot. A work that breaches the Plano Diretor Municipal, encroaches on a boundary or sits in a protected area may have no legalisation route. The municipality retains its supervision power (fiscalização) and can act years after a sale.
The financing and resale problem, which is the one buyers meet first. A lender that asks for the licence and receives an incomplete file may decline or revalue. A future buyer running the same three checks will find the same gap, and will price it.
Two adjacent document failures cost money on their own terms. The Certificado Energético must be delivered to the buyer before the contract is signed, and its absence carries fines of €250 to €3,740 for individuals and €2,500 to €44,890 for companies under Article 35.º n.º 1 of Decreto-Lei n.º 101-D/2020, de 7 de dezembro. Obtaining one costs roughly €120 to €250 plus IVA on the open market for a dwelling, of which the regulated ADENE registration fee is €28 for a T0 or T1 and €65 for a T6 or larger. Our energy performance certificate guide covers the exemptions and the declaração de isenção that an exempt property still needs.
The Ficha Técnica da Habitação is required for anything built, reconstructed or extended after 30 March 2004 under Decreto-Lei n.º 68/2004, de 25 de março. The duty to produce it survived DL 10/2024 even though the handover at the deed did not.
Which buildings fail this check most often?
Four regional patterns recur, against a national picture where 35.8% of Portuguese buildings need repair according to INE Censos 2021.
That figure splits into 21.8% needing light repair, 9.4% medium and 4.6% deep (INE, Censos 2021). Medium and deep together give 14%, which is the honest number for serious condition problems. Condition and paperwork travel together more often than they travel apart, because the same owner who deferred the roof also deferred the file. Four patterns recur by region.
Lisbon. Historic-centre buildings with pre-1919 fabric, converted attics, and internal reconstructions carried out during the 1980s and 1990s that ended the pre-1951 exemption without anyone filing for a new licence. Our Lisbon apartment inspection guide covers the technical side of the same stock.
Porto. Casa burguesa layouts split into multiple units, where the licence describes one dwelling and the building now holds three. Fraction counts are the check that catches it. The Porto buyer's guide sets out the construction-specific risks.
The Algarve. Pools, annexes, garage conversions and boundary walls added to villas over decades of foreign ownership, frequently by owners who never saw a Portuguese municipal file. Enforcement in the region is real and documented, and our guide to unlicensed construction in the Algarve covers what to check physically. The regional inspection guide covers the defect profile that goes with it.
Cascais and Sintra. Terraces enclosed into living space and basements converted below the authorised footprint, in stock priced high enough that the area difference carries real money.
Foreign buyers meet all four patterns at a disadvantage, because remote purchasing removes the measurement step entirely. Our foreign buyer's guide to buying property in Portugal covers what changes when the buyer is not in the country, and our comparison of mandatory diagnostics across Europe explains why buyers from France, Spain and the United Kingdom arrive expecting a survey Portugal does not require.
How an inspection closes the gap between the licence and the building
A Simplex Safe inspection compares the licence, the land registry and the tax record against measured reality, and records the difference in a dated document.
The three same-day checks tell a buyer whether the papers agree with each other. An engineer registered with the Ordem dos Engenheiros answers the question the papers cannot: what was built, when, and whether it stands up.
The site work compares the physical footprint against the approved drawings, records fraction counts and internal layout against the authorised layout, measures areas, and identifies works that postdate the licence. Structural interventions get the attention first, because a removed wall carries a different consequence from an enclosed balcony. Every finding is located, photographed and dated, with the inspector's cédula number identified in the report. Our guide to what a property condition report contains sets out the structure, and our guide to inspection standards in Portugal explains why OE registration is the credential that matters in a market with no mandatory inspection standard.
Timing decides what the report is worth. Before the CPCV, findings are negotiating material: a price reduction, a condition requiring the seller to regularise, or a clean exit. After the escritura, the same findings are a repair bill and a burden of proof problem, because Código Civil Art. 342.º puts the burden on whoever invokes the right and Art. 913.º gives a buyer a hidden-defect claim that has to be evidenced.
Document-level analysis has its own layer. RealOS reads the legal and valuation picture of a property from its records, without a site visit, before an inspector attends. → realos.pt
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a habitation licence still mandatory in Portugal in 2026?
The licence is still required for a property to be lawful, but since 1 January 2024 it is no longer checked at the deed. DL 10/2024 removed it as a completion requirement, which means a sale can now proceed without one. The obligation on the building did not disappear, and it transfers to the new owner along with any fines or legalisation costs attached to it.
What is the difference between licença de habitação and licença de utilização?
They describe the same municipal act. Licença de habitação is the older wording, and it appears on documents where the authorised use is housing. Licença de utilização is the term the market still uses, and autorização de utilização is the current official designation under the RJUE. What decides the position is the use recorded on the document and the version of the building it was issued against, not which of the three names appears on the front page.
Can a Portuguese property be sold without a habitation licence?
Yes, and this is what changed in January 2024. The transaction completes, the buyer takes the property and the buyer takes the irregularity. From 1 October 2026, under DL 108/2026, the sale document must state whether the urbanistic title was presented, is claimed but not shown, or is not held, and leaving that mention out makes the transaction anulável.
How do I find out whether a property has a licence?
The seller can produce it, and the Câmara Municipal that issued it holds the file. Municipal practice on releasing information to a non-owner varies, so the practical route is to require the licence as a document deliverable in the CPCV, alongside the Caderneta Predial Urbana and the Certidão Permanente. A seller who cannot produce the licence within a reasonable period is answering the question.
How long does it take to obtain a licence for an unlicensed property?
Legalisation is a municipal process rather than a fixed period, and the timescale depends on whether the work can be legalised at all, on the municipality's own Regulamento Municipal de Urbanização e Edificação, and on whether drawings and technical responsibility statements have to be produced from scratch. Buyers should treat it as months rather than weeks, and should establish before the CPCV whether a legalisation route exists.
Does the habitation licence tell me anything about the condition of the building?
No. The licence records that a use was authorised at a particular date. It says nothing about the roof, the wiring, the drainage or the structure, and a building can hold a clean licence and still carry serious defects. Physical condition is a separate question and is answered by a technical inspection, not by a document.
My areas do not match across the documents. Is that a problem?
It depends on the size of the difference. Article 28.º-A of the Código do Registo Predial waives harmonisation where the difference against the larger figure stays within 10% for urban property, 20% for rural property without geometric cadastre and 5% for rural property with it. Above those thresholds the records must be harmonised before a clean transfer, which runs through the Autoridade Tributária first and the Conservatória do Registo Predial second.
Conclusion
A Portuguese habitation licence answers one question well and another not at all. The licence establishes what the municipality authorised. Whether the standing building is that building is a separate question, and since 1 January 2024 no public official asks it before a deed completes. From 1 October 2026 a seller has to state the title position in the sale document, which surfaces the paperwork without measuring anything.
Three cross-checks close most of the documentary gap in an afternoon. The remaining gap is physical, and it is where the money sits. An InspectOS Simplex Safe inspection compares the licence, the registry and the tax record against what a certified engineer measures and photographs on site, and delivers the finding in writing while the price is still open. Against RJUE exposure reaching €99,759.58 for an individual owner and €249,398.95 for a company, that is a small line in the purchase.
→ Book a Simplex Safe inspection · get a quote at inspectos.pt/en/home-inspections
Updated August 2026 | Reviewed by the InspectOS Engineering Team, Ordem dos Engenheiros licensed | InspectOS Portugal · Legal position last reviewed 31 August 2026
Sources: Decreto-Lei n.º 10/2024, de 8 de janeiro · Decreto-Lei n.º 108/2026, de 29 de maio · Decreto-Lei n.º 155-B/2026, de 31 de julho · Decreto-Lei n.º 555/99, de 16 de dezembro (RJUE) · Decreto-Lei n.º 38382, de 7 de agosto de 1951 (RGEU) · Decreto-Lei n.º 68/2004, de 25 de março · Decreto-Lei n.º 101-D/2020, de 7 de dezembro, Art. 35.º n.º 1 · Código do Registo Predial, Art. 28.º-A · Código Civil, Arts. 342.º e 913.º · Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado · Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira · ADENE, taxas do Sistema de Certificação Energética · Banco de Portugal, position on lender document requirements · INE, Censos 2021 · Ordem dos Engenheiros