Tourist Tax in Portugal 2026: What AL Hosts Must Collect

Tourist Tax in Portugal 2026: How Much AL Hosts Must Collect in Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve

The taxa municipal turistica (municipal tourist tax) is charged per guest per night in a growing list of Portuguese municipalities. In 2026, Lisbon charges EUR 2.00 per adult per night (capped at 7 nights), and Porto, Cascais, Faro and Lagos each charge EUR 2.00 per night. As the AL registration holder, you must collect the tax from your guests and remit it to the municipality on a quarterly cycle. This guide explains the rates, the exemptions, how to show the tax correctly on your invoices and how to automate collection through Airbnb so nothing falls through the cracks while you manage from abroad.

For a foreign owner running a Portuguese Alojamento Local from London, Dublin or New York, the tourist tax is one of the easiest obligations to get wrong. It is not a national tax: each municipality sets its own rate, its own exemptions and its own declaration platform under the framework of Lei 73/2013 (the financial regime of Portuguese municipalities) and its own municipal regulation. The tax is also not income: it is money you hold on behalf of the camara municipal, which means it must be tracked separately from your rental revenue and must never be mixed into your IRS Categoria B declaration.

What the tourist tax is and who has to collect it

The taxa turistica is charged per overnight stay (dormida) and per guest, not per booking. The calculation is simple: number of taxable nights multiplied by number of taxable guests multiplied by the unit rate. It applies to hotels, AL properties, campsites and similar establishments located within the municipality that has adopted the tax.

The legal obligation to collect and remit sits with the AL registration holder (the person or company named on the RNAL registration), not with the platform and not with your property manager. Even when Airbnb collects the tax automatically on your behalf, the declaration obligation towards the municipality remains yours. If a quarter goes undeclared, the letter from the camara municipal is addressed to you.

City-by-city rates in 2026

Rates change by municipal decision, usually with effect from the start of a calendar year or a tourist season. The table below reflects the position for the main AL markets in 2026. Always confirm the current rate on the municipality's own portal before configuring your listing.

Municipality	Rate per adult per night (2026)	Night cap	Notes
Lisbon	EUR 2.00	7 consecutive nights	Declared through the CML tourist tax platform
Porto	EUR 2.00	7 consecutive nights	Own municipal platform, declaration by registration holder
Cascais	EUR 2.00	7 consecutive nights	Popular with Lisbon-coast AL investors
Faro	EUR 2.00	7 consecutive nights	Algarve gateway city
Lagos	EUR 2.00	7 consecutive nights	Western Algarve beach market
Other municipalities	Approx. EUR 0.50 to 2.00	Varies by regulation	Around 30 municipalities have adopted the tax; more join each year

Two structural rules appear in almost every municipal regulation. First, the 7-night cap: from the eighth consecutive night onwards, the guest stops paying the tax even though the stay continues. Second, the minimum age: children under 13 are typically exempt, so a family of two adults and two young children staying 3 nights in Lisbon pays 3 x 2 x EUR 2.00 = EUR 12.00, not EUR 24.00.

Exemptions you are expected to apply and document

Beyond the age exemption, most municipal regulations include exemptions that few remote hosts know how to apply correctly:

• Children under 13: keep a copy or record of the identity document showing the date of birth. You already collect this data for SIBA guest reporting, so the evidence exists in your records.
• Guests with a certified disability of 60% or more: the guest presents the multi-purpose medical incapacity certificate (atestado medico de incapacidade multiusos).
• Stays for documented medical reasons: a guest receiving treatment, or accompanying a patient, can be exempt with a declaration from the hospital or health centre.

The key word is document. If the municipality audits your declarations and finds exempted nights with no supporting evidence, the exemption is disallowed and the shortfall is charged to you, potentially with a penalty. Keep exemption evidence with your booking records for at least 5 years.

Three ways to collect the tax from guests

How you physically collect the tax shapes both the guest experience and your bookkeeping. There are three workable models:

• Option A: collected with the online booking. Airbnb supports automatic tourist tax collection for major Portuguese municipalities including Lisbon and Porto. The tax is added at checkout and the guest never has to think about it. This is the best option for remote owners because it produces zero missed collections.
• Option B: collected at check-in. Cash or MBWay payment on arrival. It gives you certainty of receipt but creates friction at the first touchpoint, and for a remote owner it depends entirely on your local check-in partner handling money reliably.
• Option C: added to the final invoice at checkout. Administratively clean, but if the guest disputes it or has already left, you are chasing a small debt across borders.

For a typical foreign-owned apartment in Lisbon or Porto listed on Airbnb, Option A is the clear recommendation. For Booking.com reservations, automatic collection is not always available for every municipality, so most hosts either build the tax into their rate structure as a visible extra fee or collect at check-in through their local partner. If you run both platforms, a channel manager can standardise how the tax appears on every reservation: see our comparison of channel managers for Portuguese AL.

Does Airbnb collecting the tax mean you are done? No

This is the single most common misunderstanding among foreign hosts. Where Airbnb has an agreement with the municipality, it collects the tax from the guest and remits it under that agreement. But the declaration obligation remains with the AL registration holder. You still need an account on the municipal platform, you still declare the taxable nights for the period, and your declaration must reconcile with what the platform collected. The municipality can cross-check RNAL activity, platform data and tourist tax declarations, and an AL with visible bookings and zero declared nights is an easy audit target.

Direct bookings, bookings from platforms without a collection agreement, and any nights where automatic collection failed all have to be collected and remitted by you directly.

Declaring and remitting: the quarterly routine

The standard workflow for a remote owner looks like this:

• Register once on the municipality's tourist tax platform (for Lisbon, the Camara Municipal de Lisboa platform), linking your NIF and your RNAL registration number. Owners with several AL units in the same municipality can usually aggregate them under one profile.
• Declare the period's nights: taxable nights, exempt nights (with the exemption category) and the resulting amount due.
• Remit quarterly: pay the balance to the municipality using the payment reference (referencia multibanco) generated by the platform. Some municipal regulations run monthly declaration cycles instead of quarterly ones, so check the cycle in your municipality's regulamento and put the deadline in your calendar as a recurring task.
• Archive the declaration receipts and payment confirmations with your accounting records.

Missing a declaration period does not usually trigger an immediate fine, but it does trigger a formal letter, and repeated failures escalate to a coima (administrative fine). Portuguese AL fines across all regulators range from roughly EUR 100 to EUR 40,000 depending on the infraction and whether the holder is an individual or a company, so the tourist tax is a cheap obligation to keep clean relative to the downside.

How to show the tax on your invoice

The tourist tax must appear on the guest invoice as a separate line, with no VAT. It is a municipal tax you are passing through, not a service you are supplying, so it never joins the accommodation line and it never enters the VAT calculation. The correct format spells out the calculation, for example: "Taxa turistica: 3 nights x 2 guests x EUR 2.00 = EUR 12.00".

The same logic applies to your income tax. The tourist tax you collect and remit is not revenue: it does not enter your gross income for IRS Categoria B and it does not affect your simplified-regime coefficient. If your bookkeeping lumps the tax into revenue, you are overstating your income to the Autoridade Tributaria and overpaying tax. This matters even more now that platforms report your gross figures under DAC7: see what Airbnb and Booking report to the Portuguese tax authority and how to reconcile it with your own declaration.

A practical setup checklist for remote owners

• Confirm whether your municipality charges the tax, the 2026 rate and the declaration cycle on the official municipal portal.
• Enable automatic collection on Airbnb where available; for other channels, decide between a visible extra fee and check-in collection.
• Create your account on the municipal platform and link your RNAL number.
• Brief your local co-host or manager on the exemptions and the evidence they must capture at check-in.
• Set a recurring calendar reminder for the declaration deadline and reconcile each period against your booking calendar.
• Configure your invoicing so the tax always appears as a separate, VAT-free line.

The whole setup takes an hour or two, and once running it is an invisible routine. Get it wrong, and it becomes a stream of municipal correspondence in Portuguese arriving at a fiscal address you may not monitor. The tax also feeds into your real profitability numbers: for how the tourist tax, commissions and IRS interact in your bottom line, see calculating your AL net yield in Portugal, and for the registration fundamentals every foreign owner needs first, see RNAL registration for UK and US owners.

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