Entry costs €360. That is not the number that matters
Search for the cost of entering the European market through Portugal and you will find a confident figure attached to the cheapest line item in the whole exercise. Incorporation really does cost €360 at the counter. It is also somewhere around one per cent of what the first year costs a company that actually does something here. This page separates the charges we can cite from the ones only you can supply, and refuses to invent the rest.
Three kinds of number, kept visibly apart
Green means we can point at the law or the official fee table. Terracotta means it is your figure and we have no business guessing it. Everything else is arithmetic on a published rate.
Public chargesCited from the official tables
Your figuresWe will not guess these
Recurring, every yearComputed from rates in law
Why the salary swallows everything else
Portuguese employment costs are not unusual by European standards. They are unusual compared with what people budget, because two features catch foreigners out at once.
- Fourteen payments, not twelve. Holiday and Christmas subsidies are additional months of pay, not a bonus you can decide against
- Employer social security at 23.75% sits on top of the gross, so the employee’s own 11% is not what you are paying
- Together they turn a €2,500 salary into a €43,313 cost — about 1.44 times the twelve-month figure
- Any tax advantage has to beat the cost of the people a regime obliges you to employ
- A regime that saves €10,000 and requires one hire is a loss, not a saving
- Hiring one person well beats hiring two to satisfy a quota, on both cost and defensibility
- Model the salary before the rate. The rate is the smaller number, always
The numbers that we deliberately left blank
This is the part other cost pages fill in with confident ranges. Here is why we do not.
Set entirely by the country your documents come from, and the spread between jurisdictions is wide enough that any average we published would be wrong for almost everyone. One phone call to a notary where you are gives you a real number in ten minutes.
Ask locally, then type it inDepends on city, on whether you need a real address or a real office, and on whether you are signing for a year. Lisbon and Porto are not interchangeable, and the interior is a different market again. We would be inventing a number to look thorough.
Depends on the city and on what you needWe quote a fixed fee against a written scope, which means the number depends on the scope and not on a published tariff. What we will say is that any quote should arrive as one number for a defined job, with the state’s charges listed separately at cost.
Fixed fee, quoted before work startsLeft out of the builder on purpose, because it is a function of profit rather than of entry. At 19% on the mainland, or 13.3% in Madeira and the Azores, it only exists once you are making money — which is a different and much better problem than the cost of getting here.
19% mainland, 13.3% in the autonomous regionsWhat an entity costs when it does nothing at all
The most common unpleasant surprise is not the cost of starting. It is discovering that stopping is not free either.
A Portuguese company must have a contabilista certificado and must file whether or not it trades. The VAT returns, the SAF-T billing file, Modelo 22 in May and IES in July all still fall due on a company with no revenue. The filings are smaller; the obligation is identical.
Certidão permanente renews annually at €25. Registry entries have to reflect reality, so a change of director or address is a filing, not an email. None of this is expensive; all of it is a standing cost on an entity you may have stopped thinking about.
A missed filing is not a dormant obligation, it is a growing one, and the gerente is personally attached to the company while it exists. An entity abandoned rather than closed is the single most expensive way to leave Portugal.
Dissolution and liquidation have their own process and their own cost, and that cost is almost always smaller than two years of filings on a company nobody uses. If the plan has changed, close it deliberately rather than letting it drift.
Where the cited numbers come from
- €360 — company incorporated through Empresa na Hora, at the counter, same day.
- €220 — company incorporated online through Empresa Online, with digital signatures.
- €25 — certidão permanente de registo comercial, one year of access.
- €148.71 — national trademark at INPI, filed online, one class included; €37.69 per additional class.
- €850 — EU trademark at EUIPO, one class across 27 member states; €50 for the second class and €150 for each further class.
- 23.75% employer and 11% employee social security contributions, applied across fourteen salary payments a year.
- 19% corporate tax on the mainland and 13.3% in Madeira and the Azores for 2026, with reduced bands on the first €50,000 for SMEs.
What people ask once the total stops being €360
What does it cost to register a company in Portugal?
The public charge is €360 through Empresa na Hora, at the counter and on the same day, or €220 online through Empresa Online with digital signatures. Minimum share capital is one euro per share. Add €25 for a year of access to the certidão permanente. Those are the state’s charges; professional fees are separate and should be quoted to you as a fixed number before anyone starts.
Why will nobody give me a total?
Because an honest total depends on things only you know: whether your owners sit outside Portugal and need apostilled documents, whether you will hire, and what your adviser charges. Anyone publishing a single all-in figure has either guessed or quietly excluded the largest line. The builder on this page computes the public charges exactly and asks you for the rest.
What is the single biggest cost?
People, by a very wide margin, and it is not close. One employee on a €2,500 gross monthly salary costs about €43,300 a year once you count fourteen payments and employer social security at 23.75%. Against that, a €360 incorporation and a €25 certificate are rounding errors.
What does an entity cost if it does nothing?
It still has a floor. A Portuguese company must have a contabilista certificado and must file whether or not it trades: VAT returns, the SAF-T billing file, Modelo 22 in May and IES in July. Our accounting work starts at €180 a month. A dormant company is cheaper than an active one but it is never free, and it keeps costing until it is formally closed.
Is a trademark worth including in the first-year budget?
If you are launching a name you intend to keep, yes, and it is cheap relative to everything else. A national filing at INPI is €148.71 online including one class, with €37.69 per additional class. An EU trademark at EUIPO covering all 27 member states is €850 for one class, €50 for the second and €150 for each further class.
How do I know if your fee is reasonable?
Ask for it as a fixed number against a written scope, with the public charges listed separately at cost and receipts attached. Then you can compare two firms on equal terms. If a quote bundles state charges into one figure and will not break them out, you cannot tell what you are paying for the advice — which is usually the point of bundling them.
Replace the blanks with real numbers
Send us the structure and we will fill in the two columns this page leaves to you: our fee as a fixed number against a written scope, and a realistic figure for the documents your own country will charge you for. Public charges stay at cost, with the receipts.