Remote Work in Portugal: The Teletrabalho Rules Employers Must Follow

Teletrabalho is work carried out away from the employer’s premises using information and communication technology, and it has its own chapter in the Código do Trabalho, articles 165 to 171, as rewritten by Lei 83/2021. The chapter applies to someone working full time from a flat in Porto and to someone who comes into a Lisbon office two days a week. None of it depends on the employer being a Portuguese business, so a company in London or Boston that employs a person living in Portugal is inside the same regime from the first day.

Working remotely does not soften the ordinary rules on working time. The normal week is 40 hours across 8-hour days. Overtime carries the statutory uplifts, which start at 25% for the first hour and rise once an employee passes 100 hours of overtime in a year. Night work is paid at a 25% premium on the default window of 22:00 to 07:00. The schedule is one of the points the written teletrabalho agreement has to fix, which makes remote hours easier to record than they often are in practice.

Health and safety duties travel with the arrangement as well. Occupational health services under Lei 102/2009 and the workplace accident insurance required by Lei 98/2009 are mandatory for every employee in Portugal, and an employee at home is no exception. The same is true of the annual training entitlement of 40 hours.

The practical consequence for a foreign employer is that a remote working policy written for a head office elsewhere does not do the job. The Labour Code decides what the arrangement has to contain, and an internal policy can add to it but cannot replace it.

Yes. Article 166(2) of the Código do Trabalho requires a written teletrabalho agreement with the individual employee. It can be part of the employment contract or a separate signed document, and article 166(5) makes clear that the written form is required for proof, which is why anything left verbal tends to be the thing later in dispute.

The agreement has to settle five points:

• the usual place of work;
• the working hours and the schedule;
• the pay;
• who owns the equipment used for the work;
• how often the employee attends the employer’s premises.

Consent runs both ways. An employee who turns down an employer’s proposal to move to teletrabalho does not have to explain the refusal. Where the role is compatible with working from home and the employee asks for it, article 166(7) allows the employer to say no only in writing and with reasons, which is a real constraint on managers used to deciding this by conversation.

The teletrabalho terms sit alongside the wider duty to inform the employee in writing about pay, place of work, probation and notice at the start of employment. Our guide to employment contracts in Portugal sets out what else has to be in writing before someone starts.

The employer does. Under article 168 the employer supplies the work equipment and fully compensates the additional expenses the employee proves, such as the extra electricity, the internet connection and maintenance of the equipment. This is a statutory obligation rather than a goodwill payment, and it does not depend on the employee asking.

The amount is normally fixed in the teletrabalho agreement or in a collective agreement. Where no figure has been agreed, the Code measures the additional cost against what the employee spent in the last month of full attendance at the employer’s premises, which is a reason to set a number in writing at the start.

Tax treatment follows Portaria 292-A/2023, in force since October 2023 and still applied in 2026. The compensation is free of income tax and social security up to €1.00 for each full day of telework, split as €0.10 for electricity, €0.40 for internet and €0.50 for the computer. Each limit rises by 50% where the amount is set by a collective agreement, giving €1.50 a day. The exemption assumes a written agreement, full telework days of at least a sixth of weekly hours, and equipment the employer has not supplied. The Government summarises the effect as roughly €22 a month free of tax. Anything paid above the ceiling is treated as employment income, so income tax and the 23.75% employer and 11% employee social security apply to the excess. On the employer side these telework costs are deductible, and the 2026 State Budget allows them to be deducted at 110% for corporate tax.

The meal allowance is a separate payment and is not affected by where the person works. In 2026 it is free of tax and social security up to €6.15 a day in cash, or €10.46 a day paid on a meal card. It is not required by the Labour Code, but it is close to universal in practice and many collective agreements make it compulsory.

Article 166-A gives certain employees a right to telework where the work is compatible with it and the employer has the means to support it. The list is narrower than many employers expect and wider than a simple parental rule:

• a parent of a child up to 3 years old;
• a parent of a child up to 8 years old, where both parents alternate periods of telework or in a single-parent family, though this extension does not apply to micro-enterprises;
• a parent of a child of any age with a disability, a chronic illness or cancer, with no age limit;
• an informal carer, for up to 4 years;
• employees covered by article 195(1) of the Código do Trabalho.

Compatibility is the test that does the work here. A role built around software, writing, analysis or customer contact by phone will usually be compatible. A role that depends on a laboratory, a warehouse or a client site will usually not be. An employer that refuses has to put the refusal and the reasons in writing.

Everyone outside these categories works remotely by agreement. That agreement can be for a fixed period or open-ended, and the parties can also agree how either side may return to on-site work, which is worth deciding before the first day rather than during a change of plan.

The employer must not contact the employee during rest periods. Article 199-A puts the duty on the employer rather than the employee, applies it to everyone on the payroll and not only to teleworkers, and admits only cases of force majeure. Treating an employee less favourably for relying on the right counts as discrimination, and a breach is classified as a serious offence, which ACT, the labour inspectorate, can penalise.

For a company whose head office sits several time zones away, this needs a decision rather than a hope. If a role genuinely needs cover in the evening, that cover belongs in the schedule and in the working time records, with the overtime or night work premiums that go with it. An expectation that messages sent at 22:00 will be read is exactly what the article rules out.

Article 169-A adds three rules for meetings. Remote meetings have to fall within working hours, preferably with 24 hours’ notice. Where the employee is asked to attend the employer’s premises, the employer pays the extra travel cost. And the employer may not require an employee to stay permanently connected by camera or microphone, which rules out the always-on video room that some distributed teams adopt.

Monitoring has its own limits. Article 20 of the Código do Trabalho allows remote surveillance only to protect people and property, or where the nature of the activity justifies it, with notice to the workforce, and never to measure performance. Article 28 of Lei 58/2019 adds that images captured by remote surveillance may be used only in criminal proceedings, and in disciplinary proceedings only so far as they relate to those, while biometric data may be processed only for attendance and access control using templates that cannot be reversed. The supervisory authority is the CNPD, alongside the GDPR.

There are two routes. One is to incorporate a Portuguese company, usually a Unipessoal Lda, which can be done the same day through Empresa na Hora for €360, then file the beneficial owner register within 30 days, appoint a contabilista certificado, register as an employer with Segurança Social and buy accident insurance. The other is to employ the person through an Employer of Record. At Employer of Record Portugal we employ the person through our own Portuguese company, registered at the commercial registry in Lisbon, and they work day to day for you.

Either way the same steps have to happen before the first day: a signed contract with the teletrabalho terms, a NIF and a NISS for the employee, the comunicação de admissão to Segurança Social before the contract starts, and payroll ready to run. After that the monthly cycle is the DMR to the AT by day 10, the income tax withholding by day 20 and social security contributions by the 25th, with the expense compensation paid inside the tax-free limits.

One route that does not fit this picture is the D8 visa, sometimes called the digital nomad visa. It is for non-EU nationals who move to Portugal while working remotely for an employer or clients outside the country, and it carries an income test of four times the national minimum wage, €3,680 a month in 2026. It is not a way of working for a Portuguese employer or an EOR, and our guide to the D8 digital nomad visa explains where the line falls.

For an EU national already living in Portugal the timing is short: contracts are usually ready within hours and onboarding typically takes one to two days once we have the details. Our fee is a flat €499 per employee per month. If you want the wider picture of employment duties in the country first, our guide to employing in Portugal covers pay, leave and termination alongside remote work.