Portugal’s legal retirement age will increase to 66 years and 11 months in 2027, according to a decree published this Monday, confirming earlier projections based on life expectancy data released by the National Statistics Institute (INE).
The decree from the Ministry of Labour, Solidarity and Social Security was published in the Diário da República and will come into force on January 1, 2026.
The new threshold represents an increase of two months compared to the retirement age set for 2026.
Under current rules, the normal age of access to the old-age pension is adjusted annually in line with average life expectancy at age 65, an indicator calculated by INE.
Provisional data released by INE in November show that average life expectancy at 65 for the 2023–2025 period rose to 20.19 years, an increase of 0.17 years, or just over two months, compared with the previous reference period. This rise directly translates into the higher retirement age for 2027.
The retirement age had remained unchanged in 2024 at 66 years and four months, following an unprecedented reduction in 2023. Both decisions were linked to a temporary decline in life expectancy caused by increased mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly among older age groups.
With life expectancy now recovering, the automatic adjustment mechanism has resumed its upward trend.
INE publishes the provisional life expectancy figure every November, and it is also used to calculate the sustainability factor applied to old-age pensions. According to the decree, the sustainability factor for pensions starting in 2026 will be 0.8237, based on the comparison between life expectancy at 65 in 2000 (16.63 years) and in 2025 (20.19 years).
