How to Choose a Tenant in Portugal: A Step-by-Step Guide (2026)

Choosing a tenant is the highest-leverage decision a Portuguese landlord makes. Every later protection — the deposit, the fiador (guarantor), the 20% late-payment indemnity of Art. 1041º CC — only softens the cost of choosing badly. A good selection process is short, written, and applied identically to every applicant: advert → criteria → document check → references → decision.

This guide walks through those five steps, the criteria you may lawfully use, a simple scoring approach, and a tax angle that now rewards finding a tenant you can keep for years.

You are free to choose your tenant — Portuguese law does not rank applicants for you — but the choice has boundaries.

Lawful, objective criteria include:

Unlawful criteria: Lei 93/2017 prohibits discrimination in access to housing, including on grounds of nationality or ethnic origin. Religion, beliefs and sexual orientation are special-category personal data under the RGPD (GDPR) and equally indefensible as selection filters. Rejecting an applicant for failing objective criteria is lawful; rejecting them for who they are is not.

Write your criteria down before you advertise. It speeds up screening, and it is your best evidence that a rejection was based on solvency rather than on a protected characteristic.

Step 1 — The advert. State the objective requirements upfront: rent, deposit, whether a guarantor is expected, house rules, and the documents you will ask for. A precise advert filters out half the unsuitable applications before they arrive.

Step 2 — Written criteria. Set your thresholds before the first viewing. For example: net household income of at least 3x the rent (for a €900 rent, about €2,700 per month — a market rule of thumb, not a legal requirement), stable employment, and one previous-landlord reference.

Step 3 — Document check. Ask shortlisted candidates for recibos de vencimento (payslips), the declaração de IRS (annual income-tax return) or a contrato de trabalho (employment contract). Collect only what the decision needs, and delete unsuccessful applicants' documents once you decide — data-protection law requires it (see our tenant-screening guide for the full RGPD picture).

Step 4 — References. Call the previous landlord. Two questions do most of the work: did the rent arrive on time, and would you rent to them again?

Step 5 — The decision. Score each candidate against your written criteria — a 1-to-5 mark on income, stability and references is enough — and pick the highest score, not the friendliest viewing.

The duration angle. A tenant who scores well on stability is worth keeping: contracts of 3 or more years with rent up to €2,300 per month qualify for a reduced 10% IRS rate on rental income through 2029 (Decreto-Lei n.º 97/2026). And a long contract does not freeze your rent — NRAU Art. 24º allows annual updates based on the INE inflation coefficient.

Once you have chosen, CompliantLease turns the decision into a compliant contract: the lease wizard generates NRAU-compliant Portuguese leases today, with guarantor terms, deposit limits and late-payment clauses that cite the exact articles they rely on. Tenant-screening reports — income verification plus a creditworthiness check via a self-uploaded Banco de Portugal credit report — arrive at launch, and the waitlist is open.