Inheritance and division

Portugal has no inheritance tax. What it has is Imposto do Selo, stamp duty. A gratuitous transfer of assets is taxed at 10% on the VPT, the rateable value held on the property's caderneta predial, and spouses, civil partners, descendants and ascendants are exempt from that charge. So far this is the part everyone repeats, and it is the reason Portugal is often described abroad as having no inheritance tax at all.

What is almost never said is that the exemption attaches to one specific item of the stamp duty table, and only to that one. There is a second item, at 0.8%, covering the acquisition of property for consideration or by gift, and the family exemption does not reach it.

The consequence is easy to state and routinely missed: giving a property to your child in your lifetime costs 0.8% of the rateable value; leaving the same property to the same child on death costs nothing. Succession on death is neither an acquisition for consideration nor a gift, so it falls outside that second item entirely. For anyone weighing a lifetime transfer against a testamentary one, that difference is the first number to have.

The exemption also does not remove the paperwork. The transfer must still be reported to the tax office, by the end of the third month following the death, and the exemption is claimed rather than assumed.

In a Portuguese partilha, a division of assets, each interested party is entitled to a quota-parte, a defined share of the estate. Where one of them takes assets worth more than that share and compensates the others in cash, the excess is treated as an acquisition for consideration and attracts IMT. Those compensating payments are called tornas.

The excess is measured against the rateable value of the assets or, if higher, against the value the division itself was built on. The rate, as with exchanges, is the one corresponding to the full value of the assets received, not the rate the excess would attract if it stood alone.

Here sits an exclusion that changes the outcome completely and that rarely appears explained in English. Where a division follows the dissolution of a marriage, the excess over the meação, the marital half, is not subject to IMT, unless the marriage was celebrated under the regime of separação de bens, separation of property.

Portuguese marriages carry a property regime, chosen at the marriage and recorded in the marriage certificate. Where no choice is made, the default is comunhão de adquiridos: assets acquired during the marriage are held in common, assets brought into it stay separate. There is also comunhão geral, under which essentially everything is common, and separação de bens, under which nothing is. Only the last of the three is caught.

The practical effect is striking. A couple married under the default regime can transfer the family home entirely to one spouse, with a cash balance paid to the other, and no IMT arises at all. The identical arrangement, between a couple married under separation of property, is taxed like any other purchase. It is the same house, the same money and the same paperwork, with two completely different tax outcomes, and the only thing separating them is a line in a certificate signed years earlier. That is why the simulator asks for the regime: without it, the figure means nothing.

For a marriage celebrated outside Portugal, this needs establishing rather than assuming. The regime governing a foreign marriage is not automatically the Portuguese default, and where the couple's circumstances have crossed borders it can turn on facts well outside this simulator's reach. If the property is here and the marriage was not, treat the regime as a question to be answered before any figure is relied on.

As for stamp duty on that same excess, it was not possible to establish from a primary source whether the IMT exclusion carries across to it. The simulator shows the charge regardless, as the prudent reading, and flags it. It is a point to confirm for the individual case, and a fair illustration of why a division is not settled with a calculator.

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