About Us

What this site is

Portugal Sorted is an independent planning site for people moving to Portugal from the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and anywhere else. It has two halves. The tools do arithmetic you would otherwise do on the back of an envelope — take-home pay, property tax, visa income benchmarks, a monthly budget in five different places. The guides explain the rules behind that arithmetic, and where the rules come from.

It is a small independent publication, not a law firm, an immigration agency or a regulated financial adviser. Nobody here will represent you, file anything for you, or take a percentage of anything.

How a page gets written

Every guide starts from the primary source: the article of the tax code, the decree-law, the portaria, the consular documentation, the municipal resolution. Where a rule is set by statute we quote the statute and name the year it applies to. Where a figure is an editorial estimate — the city budgets on this site, for instance — the page says so on the page itself, not in a footnote nobody reads.

We work in this order:

1. Find the rule at the source that owns it, in the current wording.
2. Write the explanation, then check every number in it against that source.
3. Give the page a review date. When the rule changes, the date changes with it — or the page comes down.
4. Link the source directly, so a reader can disagree with us and check for themselves.

What this site will not do

• No invented expertise. You will not find a claim of twenty years of Portuguese immigration practice on a site that cannot name the practitioner.
• No fabricated social proof. There are no testimonials, no reader reviews and no comment threads, because we have not earned any of those yet and we are not going to write them ourselves.
• No borrowed identity. Photographs of places are credited. There is no stock photograph of a stranger presented as the site owner.
• No vague authority. “Experts say” appears nowhere; a named authority with a link appears instead.
• No paid placement disguised as advice. If that ever changes, it will be labelled at the top of the page it affects.

What we get wrong

Portuguese rules change every January, sometimes twice a year, and municipal decisions land quietly in December. Tax residency has edge cases that depend on treaty wording. Visa files are decided by a consular officer reading documents, not by a formula. We will get things wrong, and the useful thing is not to pretend otherwise — it is to make corrections easy and visible.

If a page is out of date or a calculation is wrong, tell us. Include the page address and, if you have it, a link to the official text. Corrections to a figure are made at the source, which means the calculator changes as well as the prose.

How the site is paid for

Today: it is not. There is no advertising, no affiliate programme and no sponsor on any page. If advertising is introduced, it will be display advertising that cannot influence which tools exist or what the guides conclude, and every ad slot will be labelled. The calculators will stay free and will keep running in your browser rather than on our server.