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Decree-Law 76/2024: what actually changed for Alojamento Local

Decree-Law 76/2024 dismantled most of the Mais Habitação restrictions: no more expiring registrations, power back to municipalities, new condominium rules. What it means for your AL — with official sources.

Between 2023 and 2024, Portugal's Alojamento Local regime changed direction twice. First came Mais Habitação, a package of restrictions that left many hosts doing anxious math. A year later, Decree-Law no. 76/2024 of 23 October — in force since 1 November 2024 — dismantled most of those measures. If you gave up following the back-and-forth, this article is your map: what fell, what stayed, and where you should be paying attention in 2026.

Where we were coming from: what Mais Habitação had imposed

Law no. 56/2023 (the "Mais Habitação" package, October 2023) hit AL with a set of hard measures: suspension of new registrations across most of the country, registrations valid for five renewable years plus a general reassessment scheduled for 2030, a brand-new extraordinary levy (the CEAL), personal and non-transferable registrations, and a stronger role for condominiums — including a requirement for prior condominium approval to register an AL in a residential unit.

This is the package Decree-Law 76/2024 largely reversed: its article 5 expressly revokes articles 18 to 21 and 52 of Law 56/2023 and amends the AL legal regime (Decree-Law no. 128/2014) accordingly.

The end of the CEAL — and why it wasn't Decree-Law 76/2024 that killed it

Worth being precise here, because there's plenty of confusion in circulation: the CEAL was not revoked by Decree-Law 76/2024. It was eliminated by Decree-Law no. 57/2024 of 10 September, a month earlier — with retroactive effect to 31 December 2023 (a date fixed by Rectification Declaration no. 34/2024/1). In practice, the retroactivity erased the only year in which the levy would ever have been due.

The same decree also removed the aggravated IMI "vetustez" coefficient that Mais Habitação had created for AL properties. Decree-Law 76/2024 then finished the cleanup by revoking the remaining AL measures of Law 56/2023.

The end of expiry: your registration no longer has a term

Mais Habitação had introduced registrations valid for five renewable years, plus a general reassessment of all registrations during 2030. Decree-Law 76/2024 revoked article 6-A of the AL regime and the articles of Law 56/2023 that underpinned the reassessment and the lapsing of inactive registrations.

The effect: your registration no longer has an expiry date — there are no renewals to request and no reassessment on the calendar. (A note on rigour: the law never uses the phrase "indefinite duration"; the effect follows from revoking the expiry rules.)

What about transferability?

The "personal and non-transferable registration" rule fell too. Registrations can be transferred again — with one important nuance: in containment areas, the municipal regulation may impose proportionate limits on the transfer of new registration numbers for the "moradia" and "apartamento" categories, except in cases such as inheritance, transfer to a spouse or de-facto partner, descendants or ascendants, and divorce.

Power went back to the municipalities — and that's where to watch

This is the change with the most practical consequences for 2026. The automatic nationwide suspension of new registrations is gone; in exchange, municipalities gained their own instruments:

  • They can approve a dedicated administrative regulation for AL in their territory (article 4(5) of the AL regime);
  • That regulation is where they define containment areas and sustainable-growth areas, down to parish level or specific zones (article 15-A);
  • While preparing the regulation, they can suspend new registrations for up to one year in specifically delimited areas (article 15-B(2));
  • Municipalities with more than 1,000 registrations had 12 months to decide whether to exercise this regulatory power.

In practice, "can I open or expand?" no longer has a national answer — it's answered municipality by municipality, in regulations that change with little fanfare. That's exactly the kind of quiet change worth tracking closely: we already follow the rules per municipality in Lisboa, Porto, Cascais, Albufeira, Loulé and Lagos.

Condominiums got a voice — but with clear rules

Decree-Law 76/2024 replaced the Mais Habitação model with two distinct mechanisms, which shouldn't be confused:

  1. Opposition to an existing AL: the condominium assembly can object through a reasoned resolution approved by more than half of the building's permilage, on the grounds of repeated, proven conduct that disturbs the normal use of the building and affects residents' rest. The decision belongs to the mayor (presidente da câmara), with room for a settlement phase before cancellation. If the registration is cancelled this way, the property can be barred from AL for up to five years.
  2. A ban going forward: the condominium can amend its internal regulation to prohibit AL in the building, with approval of two thirds of the permilage — but that ban only applies to future registrations; existing ALs are unaffected.

At the same time, the requirement for prior condominium authorisation to register a new AL in a residential unit — a Mais Habitação measure — was scrapped.

What did NOT change: SIBA, insurance, tourist tax and IRS

None of the following was touched by Decree-Law 76/2024 — your day-to-day obligations remain exactly the same:

  • Reporting foreign guests: still mandatory, via accommodation bulletin, within three working days, to the GNR or PSP (Law no. 23/2007, articles 15 and 16). The full process is in our practical SIBA guide.
  • Civil liability insurance: still mandatory, with a minimum capital of €75,000 per claim (article 13-A of the AL regime); lack of valid insurance is grounds for cancelling your registration. We've covered what the law requires from your policy.
  • Municipal tourist tax: still set municipality by municipality — one more reason to know your concelho's rules.
  • IRS: the tax treatment of AL income was not altered by this decree. If you're in the simplified regime, see when it works in your favour and when it costs you.
  • Identification plaque and complaints book: still mandatory (articles 18 and 20 of the AL regime).

Timeline and sources

DateWhat happened
6 Oct 2023Law no. 56/2023 (Mais Habitação): AL restrictions, CEAL, expiring registrations
10 Sep 2024Decree-Law no. 57/2024 revokes the CEAL and the IMI aggravation, effective 31/12/2023
23 Oct 2024Decree-Law no. 76/2024 published: reverses the Mais Habitação AL measures
1 Nov 2024Decree-Law no. 76/2024 enters into force
Dec 2024Rectification Declaration no. 39/2024/1 corrects cross-references
2025Municipalities with 1,000+ registrations decide on their regulations
20 May 2026EU Regulation 2024/1028 — the European data-sharing rules — starts to apply

This is where ALerta comes in

Decree-Law 76/2024 took pressure off hosts — but it moved regulation to a different place. It stopped being one national law you read once, and became a mosaic of municipal regulations that change without warning on council websites.

That's what ALerta's Radar is for: we track your municipality's regulations, the decrees in the Diário da República and the European rules, and we alert you when something changes that affects you — before it catches you off guard. Join the waitlist and hear about it first.

Sources