A Portuguese company has fewer filings than its reputation suggests, but they are unforgiving about dates and several of them fall on days nobody remembers. The fifth of the month is the one that catches people, every time.
Tell the panel what kind of company you are and it will show only the obligations that apply to you, in the order they arrive.
Most of the calendar is routine and handled by whoever keeps your books. Three things are different, because missing them has consequences beyond a fine.
The 5th, for the SAF-T billing file. It arrives before the month’s bookkeeping is finished, which is exactly why it is missed. It is also the filing the tax authority uses to pre-fill and cross-check everything else, so a gap here surfaces later as a discrepancy in returns you thought were fine.
15 July, for the IES. This single filing carries the accounts, the annual statistical return and the confirmation of beneficial ownership. Miss it and the RCBE goes stale, which is the point at which banks stop processing things and nobody can tell you why.
The payments on account. They are not a return, so they are easy to overlook, and they are calculated from last year rather than this one. A company that had a strong first profitable year owes instalments in the following year regardless of how that year is going. Budget for them in the year you make the profit, not in the year they arrive.
Payments on account are 80% of the prior year’s tax below €500,000 of turnover and 95% at or above it, split across July, September and 15 December. So a good 2026 produces a cash obligation through 2027 that has nothing to do with 2027 trading. Companies that treat the first profitable year’s tax bill as the whole cost are surprised twelve months later, usually in July.
Portugal separates the failure to file from the failure to pay, and charges for both.
The last row is the one worth attention. A company’s situação tributária regularizada — the certificate confirming nothing is outstanding — is requested constantly: by banks, by public buyers, when applying for incentives, sometimes by private counterparties. It is refused while anything is open, including small things, and getting it reinstated takes longer than the original filing would have.
It moves to the next working day. This sounds trivial and causes real errors, because the rule is applied to the statutory date rather than to a date anyone publishes in advance. The quarterly VAT return for the final quarter of 2026 is the current example: the 20th falls on a Saturday, so the filing runs to the following Monday, with payment by the 25th as usual.
Build the habit of filing before the stated date rather than calculating the grace. The extra days exist, but relying on them means recalculating a rule every quarter for two days of benefit.
Two things worth having on your radar rather than in your plans. The requirement for a qualified electronic signature on invoices, and the mandatory accounting SAF-T file, have both been postponed more than once; treat announced dates as provisional until they survive a budget. And the EU’s digital reporting reforms will, in time, replace parts of this calendar with near-real-time transmission. Neither changes anything you must do this quarter.
The division of labour matters more than the list. In a typical arrangement the certified accountant files Modelo 22, the IES, the VAT returns and the payroll filings, and is professionally responsible for them. The SAF-T billing file usually comes out of your invoicing software and is submitted by whoever operates it — which in a small company is often the founder, who did not realise it was theirs.
Ask the question explicitly at the start of the engagement, for each line in the panel above. The filings that get missed are almost never the complicated ones; they are the ones each side assumed the other was handling.
Certified accounting, every filing above submitted on time, the payments on account forecast a year ahead so they are budgeted rather than discovered, and a clear written split of who does what. You get a reminder before each date, not an explanation after it.
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