The Portuguese Tax and Customs Authority has refunded taxpayers approximately 2 billion euros in IRS tax refunds, as confirmed by the Ministry of Finance today.
The Ministry of Finance released a report on 2024 income tax return submissions, indicating that the Tax Authority received “around 6.3 million declarations” between April 1 and June 30, of which “more than 1.7 million” were confirmed via automatic IRS.
As the declarations are submitted, the Tax Authority proceeds with their validation. By the last day of the submission deadline, the Finance Ministry reported having processed 5.3 million declarations, an increase of over 400,000 compared to the same date in 2024.
Out of the 5.5 million declarations processed, “more than 2.31 million resulted in IRS refunds,” totaling 2.14 billion euros.
“As of the same date, almost 2.2 million refunds were paid, amounting to a total of 2 billion euros, with 679,000 corresponding to declarations submitted through automatic IRS,” the Ministry of Finance mentioned in the same statement.
For declarations submitted through the automatic IRS feature, the average refund processing time is 12.8 days.
The Ministry did not specify the average refund time for declarations submitted via the standard method nor the overall average processing time combining both methods.
The IRS submissions began on April 1 and concluded on June 30. The submission deadline is uniform across all income categories.
Taxpayers eligible for automatic IRS who did not confirm their declarations by June 30 saw their provisional declarations automatically filed as final by the tax authorities at the deadline.
The IRS Code allows these taxpayers to submit a substitute declaration on the Finance Portal “within 30 days after processing without any penalty.”
For taxpayers who submitted their declarations by June 30, the Tax Authority has until July 31 to complete processing and an additional month to issue IRS refunds.
Taxpayers who receive a payment notice due to needing to pay additional taxes as determined by the final IRS calculation have until September 1 to make the payment, since August 31 falls on a Sunday in 2025, extending the deadline to the following day.
