REHABILITATING AND BUILDING HOUSES WITHOUT A PERMIT ARRIVES IN SEPTEMBER 2026

Building a house in Portugal is an exercise in patience. Deliver documents, wait for the municipal services to verify them, wait for the technicians to analyze them, correct what is requested, wait longer. It is a cycle that repeats itself for months (sometimes years) and that slows down the development of housing in a country that is experiencing a housing crisis with no end in sight.

However, this Friday, this cycle of patience gained a new lease of life with the publication of a diploma in the Official Gazette that thoroughly revises the Legal Regime for Urbanization and Building (RJUE) with the aim of reducing bureaucracy in licensing and unblocking the construction of housing o.

The most radical change in this law is in the way the State now faces prior communication, the procedure most used by current construction.

In the previous logic, even in a prior communication, the municipalities entered the scene as soon as the sanitation and preliminary assessment phase to verify that the documents were in order. It was a merely formal verification, but it consumed time and resources, and which generated huge disparities from municipality to municipality.

• A diploma published this Friday in the Official Gazette eliminates the mandatory license in various types of construction works from September.
• Promoters with complete prior approval from the municipality are exempt from any license to proceed with works.
• Rebuilding a property without changing the façade no longer requires a permit, even in heritage protection zones.

https://eco.sapo.pt/2026/05/29/reabilitar-e-construir-casas-sem-licenca-chega-em-setembro/

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The decree-law now published explicitly recognizes this dysfunction, noting that prior communication "no longer constituted, in reality, a mechanism for prior control of urban operations", because municipal intervention before the start of the works "only occurred in the sanitation and appraisal phase. preliminary injunction, for the purposes of a mere formal verification of the documentary delivery, which does not provide for a content analysis or a rejection of the claim for material invalidity".

The solution now presented eliminates this phase and there is now a single moment of presentation of all the information, after which the promoter can start the work without depending on any administrative act. The responsibility for the legality of the operation passes entirely to the private sector – promoter, designer and construction director. But this change does not apply to any land or any project.

In order for an urban operation to proceed by prior communication, the urban parameters must be "effectively defined", whether in a detailed plan, execution unit or subdivision operation, covering alignments, heights, number of floors, number of dwellings, land uses and planned demolitions or maintenance; or in consolidated urban areas where the new construction does not exceed the most frequent height of the facades of the street where it is located.

This second, lesser-known way has an enormous practical reach in the main cities, where most of the urban fabric has this classification. In practice, indirect pressure is created on the Chambers that still do not have complete detailed plans to accelerate them and, for the more organized municipalities, the construction of housing can be unblocked immediately.

Less bureaucracy to build and rehabilitate properties

• A land with a complete favorable prior information paper (PIP) becomes a value-added asset, tradable with a kind of construction guarantee incorporated in the price.

For promoters who want to certify the feasibility of a project before moving forward, the decree-law now published reinforces the role of prior information (PIP) and goes further: when this request focuses on all relevant urban parameters — alignments, heights, uses, number of dwellings, construction area, demolitions and planned maintenance – the operation is automatically exempt from license and prior communication.

The diploma establishes that, when a developer asks the City Council in advance for favorable prior information and this information already sets all the relevant parameters for the project (implantation of the building on the land, height of the facades and number of floors, construction area and number of dwellings allowed, any demolitions to be carried out, land transfers to the municipality and necessary urbanization works), the construction can proceed directly without any further license or prior communication. It means that those who do their homework well right from the start, and get a complete favorable response from the City Council, are exempt from asking for permission to build again.

In the real estate market, this change has an immediate effect: a land with a full favorable PIP becomes an asset with added value, tradable with a kind of construction guarantee incorporated into the price. The discussion is no longer held at the Chamber's counter and starts to take place at the time of purchase of the land.

In the rehabilitation market, the diploma also brings a change that, despite being technical in its formulation, has a direct impact on hundreds of projects:

• First of all, by clearly introducing the definition of reconstruction works, as being the "restoration of the situation of the last valid antecedent of the building or fraction", respecting the dimensions of the facades, The relationships between spans, the swinging bodies and the roof are completely exempt from license and prior communication.
• And then by establishing that reconstruction works are completely exempt from license and prior communication. It means that the interior can change completely and the structure can be intervened. What cannot change is the visible outer "envelope". And this exemption now also extends to reconstruction works in protection zones of classified properties, a case that until now always required a license.

For developers specializing in urban rehabilitation in the historic centers of Lisbon or Porto, where the value of real estate is higher and the pressure to speed up processes is more intense, this is one of the most concrete and immediate changes to the entire diploma.