VAT and factura in Portugal for hoteliers.
Talk with Guest ships with a certified invoicing engine for the Portuguese market — factura sequences, SAF-T (PT) exports, VAT rules per rate plan. This guide covers what your accountant will ask, what the Autoridade Tributária expects, and what you set up during onboarding.
Portuguese VAT rules for hospitality in 2027
Accommodation services in mainland Portugal are taxed at the reduced VAT rate of 6 percent under CIVA verba 2.17. This applies to the room night itself and to breakfast when included in the room rate. Food and beverage sold separately, laundry, spa treatments and other services are generally taxed at the standard rate of 23 percent. Extended-stay bookings (typically 90 nights or longer in the same accommodation) can qualify for the residential VAT regime; discuss with your accountant.
The Autonomous Region of Madeira applies a reduced rate of 5 percent and the Azores applies 4 percent, so if you operate a property in either region the rate structure needs region-specific configuration. Talkguest handles the multi-region setup automatically once the property's location is confirmed during onboarding.
- 6 percent VAT on accommodation and included breakfast (mainland).
- 23 percent VAT on separate food and beverage, spa services, laundry.
- 5 percent VAT on accommodation in Madeira.
- 4 percent VAT on accommodation in the Azores.
- Tourism tax (taxa turística) is not VAT but a municipal charge, invoiced separately.
The factura sequence and the certification requirement
Every invoicing platform used in Portugal must be certified by the Autoridade Tributária under the Portaria 363/2010 and its subsequent updates. Certification means the platform has been audited to preserve invoice integrity — no invoice can be deleted, every sequence must be continuous, every document must carry a QR code and a hash chain. Talkguest is certified under number 3287 and the certification is renewed annually.
What this means in practice for the hotelier: every factura, factura simplificada, nota de crédito and recibo is generated in a certified sequence, carries a QR code that the guest can scan to verify, and cannot be edited after issue. A mistake requires a nota de crédito against the original factura. Reception cannot delete a document. The head of finance cannot delete a document. Nobody can.
The most common accountant complaint about hotel invoicing systems is that receptionists edit documents after issue and produce sequence gaps. On a certified platform this is impossible by design, which is exactly what your accountant wants.
SAF-T (PT), atCUD and the AT communication
Portuguese law requires the monthly communication of all invoicing data to the Autoridade Tributária. This happens through two mechanisms:
- The atCUD code, embedded in every factura at the point of issue. This is a per-invoice code that the AT can look up in its own systems. Talkguest generates and embeds it automatically.
- The monthly SAF-T (PT) export, an XML file that summarises every document issued in the period. This is uploaded to the AT portal by the fifth day of the following month.
Talkguest generates the SAF-T (PT) file on the first day of every month for the previous month, and the head of finance or the accountant downloads it and uploads it to the AT portal. On the 214 Portuguese properties currently on the platform, we have not had a SAF-T rejection since Q2 2025. If your current accountant does the SAF-T upload manually from spreadsheets, moving to a certified platform will save them roughly four hours a month.
The recibo and prepayments
A common question during onboarding: when a guest prepays a non-refundable rate at booking, when is the factura issued? The answer depends on your accounting policy. Two approaches are compliant:
- Issue a factura at the moment of payment, dated at booking. The service is deemed provided at booking for a non-refundable reservation. This is what most Talkguest customers do.
- Issue a recibo at payment and a factura at check-in. This is compliant but produces more documents. Some hoteliers prefer this because the factura date aligns with the stay date.
Whichever approach your property picks, Talkguest applies it consistently to every reservation. Mixing approaches within the same property is not compliant; the system prevents it by design.
Handoff to your accountant
Every Talkguest property has an accountant role in the platform with read-only access to the invoicing views, the SAF-T exports, the VAT summaries and the reconciliation reports. Most accountants prefer to work directly in Talkguest rather than exporting to Excel. If your accountant prefers Excel, the monthly VAT summary exports to XLSX with one click and matches the format the AT expects for the modelo 3.
For groups with a single accountant across multiple properties, the group view aggregates VAT summaries across every property with a single log-in. This is the setup for the eleven Chiado group properties we onboarded in 2026.
The right time to involve your accountant in the Talkguest setup is week one of onboarding, not week four. If your accountant has a preference on prepayment invoicing, we want to know before we go live, not after.
The tourism tax and municipal charges
Lisbon and Porto both charge tourism taxes that vary by season and by property category. Talkguest configures the tax as a separate line item on the folio, not as VAT, and generates the monthly declaration to the municipality automatically. If your municipality changes the tax rate mid-year — as Lisbon did in 2025 — the change propagates the moment we update the master configuration and no property has to touch it.
What to read next
Invoicing is often the last module a property tunes because it works from day one. Once it does, the natural companions are the staff permissions guide — the accountant role is worth setting up cleanly — and the accounting module overview.