No new licence to operate in the Madeira International Business Centre will be granted after 31 December 2026. A licence granted before that date carries the 5% rate through to the end of 2033. Miss it and there is no queue to join — the regime simply stops admitting.
Lodging an application before 31 December is not what secures the licence. Where the application concerns a company still to be formed, the licence is treated as granted only once evidence of incorporation and commercial registration has been produced. A file sitting with SDM on 30 December, with no registered company behind it, is not a licence.
That single detail is what turns a December deadline into a November one, and it is the reason the path below runs backwards from the end rather than forwards from today.
Seven years, 2027 through 2033, at 5% instead of the regional or mainland alternative. The catch is the plafond: a ceiling on how much taxable profit the 5% may be applied to, set by how many people you employ. Profit above the ceiling is taxed at the ordinary Madeira rate, so the benefit stops scaling exactly where most projections assume it keeps going.
The confusion around this regime comes from the fact that two separate deadlines were changed by two separate budgets, in opposite directions.
The 2025 State Budget fixed the close of the admission window at 31 December 2026. The 2026 State Budget then extended the benefit horizon from 2028 out to 31 December 2033. So the door got no wider, but the room behind it got considerably larger — which is precisely why a licence is worth more this year than it was last year, and worth nothing at all next year.
The 5% is conditional on creating jobs and, in most cases, investing €75,000 in fixed assets within the first two years. One employee in the first six months satisfies the job test at the lowest tier; six or more in the same period waives the investment requirement entirely.
Beyond that sits a second cap that rarely gets mentioned: the benefit itself is limited by reference to activity genuinely generated in the region — a percentage of gross value added, of annual labour costs, or of turnover. A company with a licence, a ceiling it never approaches and almost no regional activity does not get the full 5% simply because it filed on time.
And the licence is revocable. Where substance is found to be absent, the benefit is recovered for the years it was taken. We have written separately about what substance actually requires, because it is the part that determines whether any of this survives an inspection.
Madeira applies a standing regional corporate rate of 13.3% in 2026, falling in step with the mainland to about 11.9%. It requires no licence, no job commitment, no €75,000, no plafond, no annual defence of substance and no deadline whatsoever. It is simply what companies established in the autonomous region pay.
Run the panel above at a profit of a few hundred thousand with one or two employees and the gap between 5% and 13.3% over seven years is real but not transformative — and it arrives with conditions attached that the alternative does not have. The MIBC earns its cost at scale, or where the structure needs the regime for reasons beyond the rate. Below that, the unglamorous regional rate is very often the better trade, and we say so in the Madeira guide.
If your profit comfortably exceeds a few hundred thousand a year, you were going to employ people in Madeira regardless, and you can have a registered company by mid-December — then yes, this deadline is real and the seven-year lock is worth chasing.
If you are still deciding whether Portugal is the right country, the deadline should not be what decides it. A rushed licence against a hard date, on a structure that was not going to work anyway, is the most expensive way to save two percentage points.
We will run your numbers against the plafond, price the conditions, and compare the result with the 13.3% you can have without any of them. If the answer is that you should not bother, that is what we will tell you — there is no version of this where a rushed licence helps you.
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