The Government approved today more changes to the rules for local accommodation (AL), eliminating the non-transferability of licenses defined by the previous executive, 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 management to “correct some errors” of the socialist executive.
«We approved an earlier version of a diploma that eliminates some gross errors, such as the non-transferability of licenses, the expiry after five years, allowing, on the other hand, not to introduce a situation of market deregulation, but after much dialogue with several entities, including sector agents, a logic of decentralization», he stated.
For the Government, “it should be the municipalities that make decisions on the operating rules for local accommodation in areas of greatest pressure”.
The expectation is that the diploma 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 succession.
The package then presented by the socialists also defined that inactive AL holders had to prove that they maintained their activity. In case of non-compliance, the registrations would be cancelled, by decision of the president of the respective municipality.
The rules established, on the other hand, that AL registrations would be reviewed during the year 2030 and, from the first review onwards, renewable for five years.
The only exception would be establishments that provided real guarantee for loan contracts that had not yet been fully settled on December 31, 2029.
Leitão Amaro recalled that, as announced by the Government at the beginning of its entry into office, “penalizing measures” for the sector have already been corrected, such as the extraordinary contribution and the aging coefficient for the purposes of paying Municipal Property Tax.
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