Alojamento Local in 2026: Which Lisbon, Porto and Algarve Areas Still Allow New Registrations

The blanket, nationwide suspension that scared off buyers between 2023 and 2024 is gone. What replaced it is a patchwork of municipal decisions, freguesia by freguesia, updated as often as monthly in Lisbon's case. This guide lays out where that patchwork stands right now, area by area, with the source and date behind every status.

The legal backdrop in three moves

Lisbon: three freguesias closed, three more restricted

Lisbon rewrote its municipal AL regulation (RMAL) in December 2025, in force the next day, and now grades the city at three levels: município, freguesia, and inside some freguesias, individual bairros. A ratio of 10% AL units to permanent housing or higher is absolute containment, closed to new registrations with narrow exceptions. Between 5% and 10% is relative containment, where a registration can still go through with the câmara's authorization. Lisbon cancelled 6,765 registrations in February 2026 for lapsed or missing insurance, and the ratios were reclassified that April as a direct result.

Bairro-level detail moves inside these numbers every month, and this guide will not pretend to track it in real time. Confirm the specific street through the CML's own classification tool, or file a prior information request, before relying on the freguesia figure alone.

Porto: five freguesias in the historic center closed, ten more on a quota

Porto approved its own municipal regulation in December 2024 (Regulamento n.º 1462/2024), using a single 15% threshold instead of Lisbon's two-tier system. In May 2026 the câmara began cancelling 1,413 irregular registrations, with a path to regularize rather than an automatic loss.

Porto publishes a live version of this map at geo.cm-porto.pt/regulamentoal/mapa/, searchable by address. Treat the figures above as a snapshot, not a guarantee, and check the live tool before filing.

Algarve: open everywhere, watched closely in three municípios

No Algarve município runs a binding containment regulation as of the last check for this guide, July 2026. That is a genuinely open door, not a technicality. It is also not a permanent one.

Albufeira, Loulé and Portimão each crossed the 1,000-registration threshold on the Decreto-Lei 151/2026 clock: a formal vote by 31 December 2026, with the option of a temporary suspension before that vote lands. None of the six municípios above publish a live containment map the way Lisbon and Porto do, so a written request to the câmara is the only reliable check today.

What owners and buyers should do next

None of this replaces a direct check with the c√¢mara. Ratios move monthly in Lisbon, the Algarve has no public map yet, and a status confirmed in July can read differently by September. Where a source was more than a few months old or conflicted with another, this guide says "confirm with the c√¢mara" rather than guess.

Frequently asked questions