IRS filing calendar: the 2026 campaign is about 2025 income

The date this page will stand behind is the filing window for the 2026 campaign. The annual return runs from 1 April 2026 to 30 June 2026, for all categories, and it is filed on Portal das Finanças. That return is about income of 2025. It uses the 2025 scale. It does not use the 2026 brackets.

Read that year-split again before you copy a number out of the 2026 brackets guide. The nine-band scale in that guide, including the 44.6 percent band from Lei n.º 73-A/2025, is for 2026 income, assessed in 2027. The return you file between April and June 2026 is the previous year and the previous scale. Mixing the two is the mistake this calendar is written to stop.

IRS automático sits inside the same window

IRS automático is available inside that same 1 April to 30 June window for people the Tax Authority pre-fills. It is not a separate season. If a person does nothing, news reports of the 2026 campaign said the provisional automatic return becomes final at the end of the deadline. Treat that sentence as campaign reporting, not as a paragraph copied out of a code in this guide. Confirm it in your own Portal session. A pre-filled return that you never open can still become your return, which is a reason to open it.

Automático is a poor fit when you need to change what the Tax Authority assumed. Overriding e-Fatura usually means you cannot use IRS automático. You then file the ordinary return and you keep the invoices for four years. Joint taxation, a dependant the pre-fill missed, a category B classification, or an option such as IRS Jovem are all reasons to read the draft instead of letting the deadline decide.

Summer assessment is the usual timetable, not a date this page read in the statute

On-time returns are generally assessed in time for a refund or a payment over the summer. Many secondary sources say assessment by 31 July and payment of tax due by 31 August. Those two dates are widely repeated for this campaign. Treat them as the usual administrative timetable that reporting describes, not as a sentence quoted from the statute. Then look at your own nota de liquidação. The date on the nota de liquidação controls. A blog's 31 July does not move the date printed on your assessment, and a refund that arrives in June does not rewrite the rule for someone whose note says August.

Preparatory cut-offs did not match across published summaries

The filing window above is the date this page is confident in. The preparatory cut-offs are not, because published summaries of the 2026 campaign did not match. Do not pick one column of the table below and call it official. Read the date in Portal das Finanças for that year.

What validating invoices is for

e-Fatura is where health, education, rent and general family expenses land in a deduction, or fail to. You check that each invoice is in the right bucket and that the tax number is yours or your household's. A bill that sits in "general" when it was a health expense, or a rent invoice the landlord never reported, changes the credit. The dependant credit in the dependants guide is not one of these invoice buckets. Do not "validate" a child the way you validate a pharmacy receipt.

What the household update is for

The household composition is where dependants and joint taxation are decided. A child born during the year, a child who left the household, alternating residence, or a spouse you will tax together with, all have to be right before the return calculates article 78-A and the quotient for joint taxation. Leaving last year's household in place is a quiet way to claim a dependant you no longer have, or to miss one you do.

What invoice classification is for, if you are independent

Freelancers classify each invoice as personal, professional or mixed. A bad classification changes category B taxable income. An expense that was personal, marked as professional, understates the profit that goes to tax. The reverse overstates it. The rules for the simplified regime and for recibos verdes decide which invoices belong in the activity at all. The independent calculator does not know how you classified a particular bill.

Annexes A, B and H

• Annex A is employment income, category A. It is the annex for a contract of employment and for the withholding your employer already took.
• Annex B is self-employment, category B. It is the annex for recibos verdes and for other business or professional income in that category.
• Annex H is where you deal with deductions when you override e-Fatura. Using it is the usual reason IRS automático is no longer available. Keep the invoices for four years.

Other kinds of income have their own annexes on the form. This page does not invent a full map of them. Rents, capital and capital gains are not "close enough" to annex A. If you are an employee with a salary only, annex A plus the deduction annexes the Portal offers may be the whole file. If you also invoice, annex B is not optional.

A late return can mean a fine and a slower refund

Filing after 30 June 2026 can mean a fine, and it can slow the refund, because the return is no longer in the ordinary queue that summer assessments are built from. This page does not invent the euro amount of the fine. The assessment note is still the document that tells you what you owe and by when. Paying on a date you saw on a forum, instead of the date on the note, is how interest starts.

Employees can use the employee calculator to see the shape of withholding against a progressive sketch. That sketch is not the 2025 assessment, and it is not a reason to skip annex A. The second reminder, because the years get mixed in conversation: the return filed in 2026 declares 2025 income under the 2025 scale. The 2026 brackets are for the return you will file in 2027.