Anexo B IRS 2026: Field Guide for Freelancers in Portugal

If you issue Recibos Verdes in Portugal, and you're on the simplified regime, you file Anexo B with your Modelo 3 IRS declaration. This is the annex for Categoria B income, business and professional activities. (On organized accounting you file Anexo C instead.)

It's also the annex most freelancers find confusing, because the field labels are compact and the logic isn't obvious from the form itself. This walkthrough explains what each part actually asks.

The short version first

Anexo B asks for three things: what kind of income you earned, how much of it, and what was already taken off it (Social Security you paid, tax your clients withheld). Each kind of income sits in its own field (campo), and the field decides the coefficient AT applies to it.

Where people get stuck is (a) picking the right income field and (b) the withholding and Social Security fields. Both are less complicated than they look. Check every figure against your own records before you submit.

Quadro 1 and Quadro 3: income type and identification

Quadro 1 asks about the nature of your income: professional, commercial and industrial for most freelancers.

Quadro 3, Campo 01, NIF. Your tax number.

Quadro 3, Campo 07, activity code. The code from the activity table of Art. 151.º CIRS, if your activity is listed there. Campos 08 and 09 take a CAE code instead, for commercial, industrial or agricultural activity that isn't in that table. Worth checking: the code should match what you actually did that year.

Quadro 4: your income

This is the main event. Each campo is one kind of income, and AT applies that kind's coefficient to it.

Campo 401, Vendas de mercadorias e produtos (sales of goods and products). Only for physical goods you sold. A services freelancer leaves this at zero.

Campo 402. Hotel and restaurant services for the 2015 and 2016 tax years only. Leave it empty.

Campo 403, income from the professional activities listed in the Art. 151.º CIRS table. This is where most service freelancers declare: programmers, consultants, designers, architects and the other listed professions. 75% of it is taxed.

Campo 404, other services income not covered by the fields above. Services not specifically listed in the Art. 151.º table, including the table's catch-all code 1519 (other service providers). Restaurant, hotel and local accommodation services have their own campos (415 to 417) and don't go here. 35% of it is taxed.

Campo 401 is not for services. It is the most common mistake on this annex: services typed into the goods field get the goods coefficient instead of yours.

Campos 405 and 406, intellectual and industrial property. Royalties and similar income. Not common for most freelancers.

Campos 412 and 413, subsidies. 412 for operating subsidies, 413 for other subsidies. Not typical for most freelancers.

Campo 414, Category B income not included in the fields above. The catch-all.

Which year an invoice belongs to. Category B income counts from the moment the VAT rules oblige you to issue the invoice, not from when the client paid (Art. 3.º n.º 6 CIRS). Work finished in early December 2025 and paid in February 2026 belongs in this year's declaration. Where no invoice is required, the payment date decides.

How the simplified regime treats your costs

Under the simplified regime you don't subtract your actual expenses one by one. The coefficient does that job: for Campo 403 income, 75% is taxed and the rest is presumed to be costs. So if you earned €40,000 in Art. 151.º services, €30,000 is your taxable income before anything else applies. In the tax year you start your activity and the following one, the taxed share is lower still, as long as you have no employment or pension income in that year and you haven't closed an activity in the last five years. See the simplified regime coefficient.

There is one catch for service income: part of that presumed-cost discount depends on proof (Art. 31.º n.º 13 CIRS). AT adds up a fixed specific deduction (€4,462.15 for 2025 income), or your Social Security contributions if those are higher, plus your documented rent, staff and other business expenses. If the total is below 15% of your gross service income, AT adds the difference back to your taxable income. With modest service income, the fixed deduction alone already covers it. The expenses come from the invoices AT holds in e-Fatura and from what you declare in Quadro 17.

Quadro 17: Social Security contributions

Quadro 17A, Campo 17001, mandatory social protection contributions. This one you do fill in. Enter the Social Security contributions you actually paid in 2025, and identify Segurança Social in Quadro 17B. If your contributions hadn't started yet in 2025, this is zero: for a first activity ever, they start on the first day of the 12th month after you open it. After that, your Segurança Social Direta account shows what you paid.

These contributions help you twice. Up to 10% of your gross service income, they count toward the documented-expenses test above. The part above that line is deducted from your taxable income (Art. 31.º n.º 2 CIRS).

Quadro 6: tax your clients withheld (retenção na fonte)

If your Portuguese clients withheld income tax when paying you, it goes here.

Campo 601, income subject to withholding. The income on which a client withheld tax.

Campo 602, tax withheld. The total tax withheld from payments you received in 2025. Withholding sits on the receipt issued when the client pays, so it belongs to the year of payment, which can differ from the year of the invoice.

This is tax already withheld on your behalf, so declare it accurately.

Withholding is done by payers who have, or must have, organized accounting in Portugal (Art. 101.º CIRS). A foreign client with no establishment in Portugal generally doesn't withhold Portuguese tax.

What to do if you have NHR or IFICI status

NHR (or its successor, IFICI) changes how some of your income is taxed, but you still declare the income in Quadro 4 of Anexo B. The regime itself is claimed in Anexo L, where you list the qualifying income against the Anexo B campo it was declared in. Without Anexo L, no 20% rate applies. The 20% flat rate applies only to income from a qualifying activity; anything else is taxed at the normal progressive rates.

A last check before you submit

The tax itself is calculated by AT after you file and arrives on your nota de liquidação, AT's official assessment, issued by July 31. So the check that matters happens before you submit. The common mistakes:

• Income in the wrong campo (Art. 151.º services in Campo 401, which is for goods)
• Withholding tax in Campo 602 is zero when it shouldn't be
• Social Security contributions in Campo 17001 are missing

Where Descodify helps

If you've been using Descodify to issue invoices, your income is already structured and classified. The IRS filing flow prepares your Anexo B values from your invoicing data, so you're reviewing rather than reconstructing.

The IRS filing tool in Descodify is free during early access. If you want to run through your Anexo B values before heading to Portal das Finanças, that's what it's there for.

See also: IRS Filing Hub, all guides, tools, and reference material in one place