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Regulation explainer

SIBA fines: what you risk when you don't report your guests (and how to avoid it)

The exact fines for not reporting guests to SIBA — €100 to €2,000, tiered under article 203 of Law 23/2007 — who issues them, and the 4 mistakes that cost the most. Verified against the law.

If you came here looking for a number, here it is, no runaround: the fine for not reporting foreign guests runs from €100 to €2,000, tiered by the number of missing bulletins (article 203 of Law no. 23/2007). It's not the amount that ruins a business — but the mechanism that produces the fine is the same one that, repeated, complicates inspections, renewals and your peace of mind. This article gives you the exact values, who issues the fines, and the mistakes that catch distracted hosts most often. All verified against the consolidated text of the law — sources at the end.

What the law requires you to report (and to whom, since SEF was wound up)

The foundation is article 16 of Law no. 23/2007: anyone providing paid accommodation to foreign citizens must report it, within three working days, via an accommodation bulletin (boletim de alojamento), to the GNR or PSP. In practice, the reporting happens electronically through SIBA — the Accommodation Bulletins Information System, run by the Border and Foreigners Coordination Unit (UCFE) within Portugal's Internal Security System (SSI).

Before you report your first guest, there's a prior obligation: registering your establishment with the UCFE as a SIBA user (article 15(4)). Without that registration you can't even comply with the main duty — and omitting the registration is itself sanctionable.

If you're still setting up your process, start with our practical SIBA guide; and if the post-SEF landscape confuses you, we've explained what changed here.

The deadline: three working days — for check-in AND check-out

The three-working-day clock starts when the guest arrives. But here's what many hosts don't know: the departure must be reported too, within the same deadline (article 16(2)). A process that only handles check-ins is doing half the job.

And if you're late without meaning to be? The law anticipates it: for negligent breach of the deadline — on arrival or departure — the minimum and maximum fine limits are cut to one quarter (article 203(2)). That's relief, not absolution: it's still an infraction.

What the fines cost — the exact values

Article 203 ("Falta de comunicação do alojamento") sets one fine per infraction, tiered by volume of missing bulletins or registrations — it is not a fine per bulletin:

Bulletins / citizens whose registration is missingFine
1 to 10€100 to €500
11 to 50€200 to €900
More than 51€400 to €2,000

(Yes, you read that right: the law says "11 to 50" and then "more than 51" — the case of exactly 51 was literally left unwritten. We quote it as it stands.)

Three notes for reading that table properly:

  • The mitigations are real and in the law: besides the one-quarter reduction for negligent lateness, negligence in general and voluntary payment each cut the limits in half (article 204). Repeat offences have had their own regime since 2025 (article 203-A, added by Law no. 9/2025).
  • The top tier arrives fast. For anyone running several properties through a full high season, three months of a broken process means dozens of missing bulletins — and the infraction jumps tiers without anyone ever deciding "not to report".
  • The fine isn't the only cost. A record of non-compliance weighs on every later inspection and stains the establishment's standing with the authorities that cross-check it.

Who enforces it and how exposed you are

Worth sorting out the entities, because they're constantly mixed up:

  • GNR and PSP are the legal recipients of the bulletins (and the ones who see them missing);
  • The UCFE/SSI operates SIBA, which everything flows through;
  • AIMA is who applies the fines: the competence sits with the board of AIMA, I.P. (article 207);
  • ASAE and the câmaras municipais enforce something else — the AL regime (Decree-Law no. 128/2014), with its own fines. Two separate sanctioning tracks; you can be spotless on one and in breach on the other.

And your exposure is growing through a new channel: since 20 May 2026, platforms send the authorities monthly activity data for every listing — nights, guests per night and each guest's country of residence — under EU Regulation 2024/1028. Cross-referencing that activity against submitted bulletins went from detective work to administrative routine. If Airbnb says you hosted 40 foreign guests in a quarter and SIBA has 12 bulletins from you, the question asks itself.

The 4 mistakes that cost the most

  1. Getting confused about who must be reported. Portuguese guests: no. Citizens of other EU Member States: yes, expressly — the law includes them by name (article 15(2)). And minors too: there's a bulletin for every foreign guest, of any age. What the law relaxes for family groups is the individual signature (one spouse or group member may sign; a parent signs for minors) — not the bulletin.
  2. Reporting the arrival and forgetting the departure. Same obligation, same three-working-day deadline. It's the most common hole in processes that look like they're working.
  3. Never having registered with SIBA. Registration with the UCFE is a stand-alone obligation — and it's the first thing missing when someone inherited the process "from the previous manager".
  4. Trusting the upload and not confirming delivery. SIBA accepts webservice, file uploads and manual entry — and a badly formatted file can be rejected without you noticing. Sending is not delivering: confirm the status of every submission.

How to never miss a deadline again

A three-working-day deadline, counted from arrival and departure, multiplied by every foreign guest, across several properties at once — that's not a discipline problem, it's a systems problem. We've written about why Excel stops being enough past a certain scale.

This is exactly the work ALerta does for you: it reads your reservations, knows which guests must be reported and when, and alerts you before any deadline slips — arrivals and departures, every property, without depending on your memory on a three-check-in day. SIBA fines are among the most avoidable in alojamento local: join the waitlist and get them out of your head.

Sources