Annual ownership costs

IMI is charged on the VPT, the rateable value on the property's caderneta predial. That is not the market value and not what you paid. On older properties without a recent assessment the gap between the two can be substantial, and it is always the register figure that counts.

The rate is set annually by each municipal assembly, within a statutory range running from 0.3% to 0.45% for urban properties. The same house, at the same rateable value, therefore pays different amounts depending on the municipality, which is why the simulator asks where it is. Every one of the308 municipalities is here, at its official rate, and eight of them set the rate parish by parish rather than once for the whole municipality.

Many municipalities also apply a fixed deduction to the IMI on an own permanent home according to the number of dependants in the household. Because it is optional and varies from one municipality to the next, it is flagged but left out of this calculation.

The surcharge to IMI does not look at each property on its own: it adds up the rateable values of every urban property a person holds on 1 January and taxes the total. An allowance of 600 000 € per taxpayer is deducted from that sum, doubling where a married couple or civil partners opt for joint taxation.

Above that, the charge is progressive. There is a first band, then higher marginal rates on the part of the holding that passes the first and second million, thresholds which also double under the joint option. One detail escapes almost every general source: those thresholds are measured against the sum of rateable values before the allowance, not after it.

Properties classified as commercial, industrial or for services, and those classified as other, fall outside AIMI altogether. In practice it is a charge on residential holdings and building land, and someone whose Portuguese holdings are in retail premises is not within it at all.

Tax, service charge and insurance together mean an idle property consumes a percentage of its own value every year. In any single year the figure is not dramatic, which is precisely why it goes unnoticed: it accumulates quietly, across a decade of indecision about what to do with a house that was inherited or left empty.

Setting this figure against what the same property would earn let, or what it would release if sold, is usually the moment the decision becomes obvious.

The figures in use are those in force in 2026 and are reviewed annually.