The government has approved further changes to the rules on local accommodation (AL), eliminating the non-transferability of licenses defined by the previous government, and now following the new decree-law for consultation by the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities.

The announcement was made by the Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, at a press conference after the Council of Ministers in Lisbon, with the government official reaffirming the initiative of the PSD/CDS-PP administration to “correct some mistakes” made by the socialist government.

“We approved a more advanced version of a law that eliminates some serious errors, such as the non-transferability of licenses and their expiration after five years, while also avoiding the introduction of a situation of market deregulation, but rather, after much dialogue with various entities, including industry players, a logic of decentralisation,” he said.

For the Government, “it should be the municipalities that make decisions on the rules for operating local accommodation in the areas of greatest pressure.”

The expectation is that the law will be definitively approved “very soon,” in a “matter of weeks.”

In the previous legislation, approved in parliament in 2023 and highly contested by the local accommodation sector, the activity license was non-transferable, even due to death, divorce or inheritance.

The package presented at the time by the socialists also defined that inactive AL holders had to prove that they had continued to operate. In the event of non-compliance, their registrations would be cancelled, by the decision of the president of the respective municipality.

The rules also established that AL registrations would be reassessed during the year 2030 and, from the first reassessment, renewable for five years.

The only exception would be establishments that constituted real guarantees for loan agreements that had not yet been fully settled by December 31, 2029.

Leitão Amaro recalled that, as announced by the Government when it took office, “penalising measures” for the sector, such as the extraordinary contribution and the coefficient of obsolescence for the purposes of settling the Municipal Property Tax, have already been corrected.