It will no longer be counted as income for the purposes of accessing other social benefits from 2026 onwards.
O informal caregiver support allowance or no longer be counted as income for the purposes of accessing other social benefits from 2026, avoiding, in practice, cortes in support such as family benefits.
The change is contained in a decree-law published this Monday in and amends the Informal Caregiver Statute.
The measure had already been announced by the Ministry of Labor, Solidarity and Social Security (MTSSS) the previous week and comes as a response to a problem associated with a 2022 regulatory decree.
This diploma led Social Security to automatically consider the benefit as income, penalizing some caregivers by pushing them to higher levels and reducing or eliminating other support.
Despite having existed for three years, the full application of these rules only occurred in the first quarter of 2025.
The co-founder and vice-president of the National Association of Informal Caregivers (ANCI), Maria dos Anjos Catapirra, says that the accounting of the subsidy as income was “applied by this Government in 2025”, generating complaints of families who saw reduced social benefits.
The impact was felt mainly among households “on the fringes” of the classes, which rose due to the value of the subsidy — in the order of “300 something euros”according to ANCI.
In mid-September, the Secretary of State for Social Security, Susana Filipa Lima, told Lusa that around 1600 beneficiaries they had already suffered cortes in other installments, admitting that the number could be higher.
In addition to excluding the subsidy from the income calculation, the diploma reviews the support framework, which leaves the solidarity subsystem and becomes part of the family protection subsystem. The Government emphasizes that the objective is to ensure that the benefit fulfills its function: supporting the provision of care to dependent people without compromising other social rights.
According to data from November 2024, Portugal had 16,153 informal caregivers with approved status, of which 61.2% were main caregivers. The country also stands out in the European Union for the high proportion of informal caregivers aged 50 or over who accumulate care and full-time work (71.9%), just behind Sweden and Denmark.
