Portugal SaaS Tax Regime: Which IRC Coefficient Applies If You Build Software?

This is Part 1 of Bootstrapping a Startup in Portugal, a series on forming a company, choosing a tax structure, finding a contabilista certificado, and running a lean SaaS business in Portugal. Written from research, before formation. Not advice.

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If you build software and sell it in Portugal, whether as a freelancer under the IRS simplified regime or through a company under the IRC simplified regime, there's a tax question that no official source answers clearly: are you a "programador informático" (code 1332, 0.75 coefficient) or a generic "other service provider" (code 1519, 0.10 or 0.35 coefficient)? The gap between those two classifications is enormous. This post maps what the law says and where it leaves you hanging.

I came at this from the company angle: I've been running a solo entrepreneur setup in Portugal for years as a trabalhador independente, and I was researching whether to form an Lda for a bootstrapped SaaS product. But the Art. 151 classification question is the same for sole proprietors under IRS and for companies under IRC, so if you're a freelance developer or a software-as-a-service builder under either regime, keep reading.

The IRC side is new ground, because the question for a company shifts: which corporate tax structure actually fits a one-founder Lda with no employees, low operating costs, and a SaaS product?

The NIPC isn't on the registry yet (that formation saga has its own series: name approval delays, an Empresa Online 2.0 system that silently rejects non-Portuguese EU citizens, a SOLVIT complaint, the works) and I haven't appointed a contabilista certificado. Before that conversation I wanted to read the IRC code myself so I'd at least know which questions to ask. These are my notes on the regime simplificado de IRC: what the law says, where the wording is ambiguous, and which incentive programs don't fit a bootstrapped solo founder.

If you're forming a company too, treat this as a starting point for the conversation with your CC, not a substitute for it. I'm not a tax professional and the live questions in this article are exactly the questions I'm bringing to mine.

What the regime simplificado does

Portugal has two ways to compute corporate income tax. The general regime (regime geral) is the one most countries use: revenue minus deductible expenses gives you taxable profit, and the IRC rate is applied to that.

The regime simplificado skips the expense calculation. The tax authority applies a fixed coefficient to your gross revenue and treats the result as taxable income, regardless of what you actually spent. The coefficient depends on the type of income.

Then the standard IRC rate applies. For PMEs in 2026, that's 15% on the first 50,000 euros of taxable income.

One important note up front: the IRC numbers in this article are company-level corporate tax as a percentage of revenue. Money still has to come out of the company before the founder can spend it, and that triggers a separate layer of tax (IRS plus Social Security on a salary, or 28% on dividends). Whenever I write "IRC on revenue", I mean only the slice that goes to the AT as company tax.

The coefficients in Article 86-B

What the law lists, by alínea:

Alínea	Coefficient	What it covers
a)	0.04	Sales of goods, restaurant and hotel services
b)	0.75	Professional activities listed in the Article 151 IRS table
c)	0.10	Other service provision and operating subsidies
d)	0.30	Non-operating subsidies
e)	0.95	IP licensing, capital gains, real-estate rents, crypto mining
f)	1.00	Gratuitous patrimonial gains
g)	0.50	Local accommodation in containment zones
h)	0.35	Local accommodation outside containment zones
i)	0.15	Crypto income (not mining, not capital gains)

There's also a startup bonus in Article 86-B paragraph 4: alíneas a) and c) are halved in the first tax year and reduced by 25% in the second. Alínea b) is not on that list. The 0.75 coefficient does not get the discount.

The two alíneas that matter for a service company are b) and c). The gap between them is large. Multiplying each coefficient by the 15% PME rate on the first 50,000 euros of taxable income:

	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3+
Alínea c), 0.10 base	0.05 -> ~0.75% IRC on revenue	0.075 -> ~1.1%	0.10 -> ~1.5%
Alínea b), 0.75 base	0.75 -> ~11.25% IRC on revenue	~11.25%	~11.25%

Same regime, same eligibility, two very different bills depending on classification.

Where it's ambiguous: which alínea applies to a SaaS?

This is the part I can't resolve from the code alone, and the part I haven't seen anyone write about clearly.

Alínea b) covers "atividades profissionais especificamente previstas na tabela a que se refere o artigo 151.º do Código do IRS." The Art. 151 table lists specific liberal professions, each with a numeric code. Code 1332, "Programadores informáticos" (computer programmers), is on it. Lawyers, accountants, architects, doctors, and many consultants are too.

Alínea c) is the residual: "restantes prestações de serviços." Activities that are not specifically listed in Art. 151 fall here. The Art. 151 table also includes a catch-all entry, code 1519, "Outros prestadores de serviços", for activities outside the named list.

So which one applies to a SaaS company?

I'm not selling programming hours. I'm running a piece of infrastructure that customers subscribe to, and the product is what gets billed. That argument points toward alínea c) at 0.10.

I'm also a solo founder writing the code that runs in the product. AT could look at the substance and call this programador informático activity at 0.75. There's a piece by Paulo Marques on the OCC side arguing exactly this principle: substance over form. The actual activity performed determines the coefficient, not the registered code. He's writing about IRS, but the same Art. 151 reference shows up in the IRC simplified regime, so the principle ports over.

I haven't found a public AT binding ruling (informação vinculativa) on SaaS subscriptions under the IRC simplified regime. Patent Box has rulings (PIV 21235, PIV 22777) on a related question, but the inverse one (does subscription revenue qualify for the alínea c) 0.10 coefficient?) doesn't seem to have an equivalent published ruling. I checked the OCC's overview and the public AT case base, and didn't find one. If anyone reading this has a citation, please send it.

Without that ruling and without a CC's reading of my specific situation, I'm not putting a single number in this article and calling it the rate.

Who qualifies for the simplified regime at all

Article 86-A CIRC sets the eligibility:

• Annual gross income up to 200,000 euros
• Total balance sheet up to 500,000 euros
• Not subject to a statutory audit
• Uses the NC-ME accounting standard (the simplest, for micro-entities)
• Capital not held more than 20% by entities that fail the income or balance-sheet conditions

Any company type can opt in. Lda, Unipessoal Lda, SA. The IRC simplified regime is separate from the IRS simplified regime (which applies to natural persons), governed by a different article of a different code. I'd assumed for a while that "simplified" meant "for sole traders only", and that's wrong.

You opt in when you open the company's activity at AT (abertura de atividade). If you don't ask, the company defaults to the regime geral. There's a 3-year lock-out if you opt in and then renounce it.

Why Patent Box and SIFIDE don't help a bootstrapped solo SaaS

Before reading Article 86-B I'd been looking at the headline incentive programs, the ones that show up first when you Google Portuguese startup tax. Both turn out not to fit a bootstrapped solo SaaS, for unrelated reasons.

Patent Box (Article 50-A CIRC) gives an 85% exemption on income from intellectual property. The Portuguese tax authority interprets "qualifying income" narrowly. Per binding rulings PIV 21235 and PIV 22777, analysed by RFF Lawyers, only royalty income qualifies: actual licensing where the licensee gets rights to exploit the copyright. SaaS subscription revenue doesn't count, because customers don't get exploitation rights, they get usage. Portugal also doesn't recognise embedded IP income the way Belgium or the UK do. And Patent Box requires the regime geral with organised accounting, so it's structurally incompatible with the simplificado.

SIFIDE II (CFI articles 35-42) gives a 32.5% to 47.5% tax credit on R&D expenses. Qualifying expenses are mostly people: employee salaries, contractor invoices, outsourced research to universities. Equipment counts. AI tool subscriptions and managed-platform hosting do not, in any direct way I could find. A solo founder building with AI and not paying themselves a salary has a small denominator to claim against. The application process through ANI is also heavy. And like Patent Box, SIFIDE assumes the regime geral.

The programs aren't bad. They were designed for a different shape of company, one with employees, physical R&D, or IP licensing revenue. That used to describe most tech startups. It doesn't describe a solo founder shipping production software with AI tools.

The sole-proprietor regime has the same classification problem

You'll see the Art. 151 question show up in the IRS simplified regime too, with different numbers. Under Article 31 CIRS:

• 0.75 for activities listed in Art. 151 (which includes code 1332)
• 0.35 for other services not in the list (where 1519 lives)
• 0.15 for sales of goods

A sole proprietor pays IRS on the deemed taxable income at progressive rates, plus Social Security at 21.4% on 70% of revenue (with a first-year exemption window). If you're an expat who moved to Portugal in 2024 or later, you may also be eligible for the IFICI regime, which changes the IRS picture significantly. See NHR vs IFICI: what expat freelancers need to know for how these interact with your tax base.

The Lda's IRC is flat, but extraction (salary or dividends) sits on top.

Whether Lda or sole proprietor is better for any specific person depends on the numbers. I'm not going to do that calculation here, because the inputs that matter (revenue mix, expenses, salary you'd pay yourself, whether you're reinvesting or extracting) are exactly the things a CC asks about in the first meeting. If you put a number in an article it'll be wrong for your situation.

One more threshold that matters if you're a sole proprietor: whether you need to charge VAT. The Art. 53 VAT exemption covers you up to €15,000 in annual revenue, but the tolerance rule at €18,750 changes the calculation partway through the year. Worth understanding before you cross either line.

What I'm taking to my CC

Concrete questions, in priority order:

1. Given my specific business model (SaaS, subscription revenue, no per-client programming work, the platform itself is the product), should this be classified under code 1332 (alínea b, 0.75) or under "outros prestadores de serviços" 1519 (alínea c, 0.10)?
2. Are there AT informações vinculativas, OCC orientações, or recent CAAD decisions on SaaS classification under the IRC simplified regime that I should have read?
3. If we choose alínea c) and AT later disputes the classification, what's the realistic exposure (back tax, interest, penalties) over a 3-year audit window?
4. Does the answer change depending on whether I take a salary as gerente (which makes the activity look more like employment-flavoured programming) or take dividends only?
5. If we opt for the regime geral instead, what does the picture look like once typical Lda expenses are deducted, and how does that compare to the alínea c) scenario?

I'll write Part 2 of this series once I've had that conversation.

Sources

All references in this post:

• Article 86-A CIRC - regime simplificado eligibility
• Article 86-B CIRC - IRC simplified coefficients and startup bonus
• Article 87 CIRC - IRC rates (15% PME, 12.5% startups, 19% standard for 2026)
• Article 31 CIRS - IRS simplified regime coefficients
• Article 151 CIRS - table of professional activities (codes 1332, 1519)
• Article 50-A CIRC - Patent Box regime
• RFF Lawyers, Patent Box analysis - AT's restrictive interpretation of qualifying income
• ANI, SIFIDE II - R&D tax credit programme
• OCC, IRC Regime Simplificado - Ordem dos Contabilistas Certificados overview
• Paulo Marques, clarifying Art. 151 activities - substance-over-form interpretation

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Next in this series: Finding a contabilista certificado in Portugal as a foreign founder.