Sick pay and parental benefits for self-employed workers in Portugal

Summary

• A self-employed worker in Portugal who pays social security contributions does build up the right to sickness benefit and parental benefit. You need six months of work and contributions behind you. Your contribution record must be clear of debt. And sickness benefit starts on the eleventh day of incapacity, not the first.
• The qualifying period is six months of work with contributions, consecutive or not. Contributions to another national or foreign scheme can count towards it.
• The waiting period is 10 days for a self-employed worker and 3 days for an employee. It disappears for a hospital admission, a day surgery, tuberculosis, or an illness that begins while you’re receiving parental benefit and continues after it ends.
• The daily sickness amount is a percentage of your reference earnings: 55% up to 30 days, 60% from 31 to 90 days, 70% from 91 to 365 days, 75% beyond that. The floor in 2026 is €9.20 a day. If your own reference earnings per day are lower than that, you receive your reference earnings instead.
• Sickness benefit runs for a maximum of 365 days for a self-employed worker, against 1,095 days for an employee.
• Initial parental benefit is paid from the first day. You choose 120 days at 100% of reference earnings or 150 days at 80%. Sharing the leave adds 30 days to either option. On top of the 120 days the rate stays at 100%, and on top of the 150 days it rises to 83%, or to 90% when each parent takes a longer exclusive share.
• You can’t work while you receive sickness benefit, and you must tell Segurança Social within five working days if you do. During parental benefit you owe no contributions at all.

Introduction

Most people who register as self-employed in Portugal think of social security as a bill. Every quarter you declare what you invoiced, and every month you pay a percentage of it. What’s far less obvious is that those payments buy you something. Sick pay for the self-employed in Portugal does exist, and so does parental benefit.

The rules aren’t the ones your employed friends describe. You wait longer before the money starts, and it stops sooner. Parental benefit, on the other hand, works almost exactly as it does for an employee.

This article sets out what you’re entitled to, what you must have paid in first, how the amounts are calculated for 2026, and what you have to do while the money is coming in. The rules below are the general ones. Your own situation can change how they apply, so treat this as information rather than individual advice.

Do self-employed workers in Portugal get sick pay?

Sick pay for self-employed workers in Portugal does exist, as long as you’re registered and contributing to Segurança Social. The benefit is called subsídio de doença. It’s paid from the eleventh day of certified incapacity, after six months of work with contributions, and only if your contribution record is clear of debt. Parental benefit runs on the same six-month rule.

A registered self-employed worker who contributes to Segurança Social is covered for sickness, parenthood, occupational disease, invalidity, old age and death. Unemployment cover is the exception. It only reaches sole traders with a commercial or industrial business and economically dependent self-employed workers.

Sickness benefit replaces part of your income while a doctor certifies that you can’t work. Parental benefit is called subsídio parental inicial and does the same around the birth of a child. Neither is automatic. Both depend on a contribution history, and on your account with Segurança Social being in order on the day the right is recognised.

Those contributions come from the standard self-employed regime. Service providers pay 21.4% on a monthly base equal to one third of the relevant income calculated each quarter. The relevant income is 70% of what you invoiced for services. That base later sets the size of your benefit.

How long must you contribute before you can claim sick pay?

The qualifying period for both sickness benefit and initial parental benefit is six months of work with contributions. The months don’t have to be consecutive, and contributions to another national or foreign scheme count towards them. A self-employed claimant must also owe Segurança Social nothing up to the end of the third month before the month of the illness or the birth.

That qualifying period is called the prazo de garantia, and you have to complete it before either benefit can be paid.

Two details matter. The month in which you stop working counts towards the six, as long as you worked and contributed for at least one day in it. And contributions to another national or foreign scheme count, provided the periods don’t overlap. That is what lets someone who moved from another EU country qualify sooner than they expect.

There’s also a gap rule. Go six consecutive months or more without contributions and the clock resets, so you build a new six-month qualifying period from your next contribution.

The condition that catches self-employed claimants

On top of the qualifying period, a self-employed claimant must have a regularised contribution position: no debt to Segurança Social up to the end of the third month before the month in which the illness or the birth happens. An employee is never asked this. You are.

If a debt appears while you’re already receiving sickness benefit, payment stops from the date the debt starts. Clear it within three months of the interruption and you keep the amounts you missed. Clear it later, and you only start receiving again from the day after the position is regularised, losing what went unpaid in between. An authorised instalment plan counts as regularised for as long as you keep to it.

One requirement does not apply to you: the índice de profissionalidade, the rule that an employee must have worked at least 12 days in the first four of the last six months. Self-employed workers are explicitly excluded from it.

If you haven’t registered with social security yet, start with your social security number and registration, then check how self-employed contributions are calculated.

How many days pass before sick pay starts?

Sick pay for a self-employed worker in Portugal starts on the eleventh day of incapacity. The first 10 days are a waiting period, and nothing is paid for them. An employee waits only 3 days. The wait disappears completely for a hospital admission or a day surgery, for tuberculosis, and for an illness that begins while parental benefit is running.

That wait is the período de espera, and it’s the biggest difference between you and an employee.

The waiting period disappears completely in three cases: a hospital admission or day surgery, tuberculosis, and an illness that begins while you’re receiving parental benefit and continues after it ends.

So a nine-day illness produces no sickness benefit at all for a self-employed worker, while the same nine days would be partly paid for an employee. A three-week absence produces eleven paid days for you.

A self-declaration of illness, the short autodeclaração de doença you can request yourself, gives no entitlement to sickness benefit. Its days can, however, count towards running down the waiting period when they run into a medically certified sick note.

How much sick pay do you get, and for how long?

Sickness benefit is a daily amount set as a percentage of your reference earnings: 55% up to 30 days, 60% from 31 to 90 days, and 70% from 91 to 365 days. In 2026 it can’t fall below €9.20 a day. For a self-employed worker it runs for a maximum of 365 days, against 1,095 days for an employee.

The percentage applies to your remuneração de referência (RR), your reference earnings per day.

Step 1. Find the reference earnings. Take the earnings registered with Segurança Social in the six oldest of the last eight months before the month your sick leave begins, leaving out holiday and Christmas pay and similar extras. Add them up and divide by 180. For a self-employed worker those registered amounts are the contribution bases produced by your quarterly declarations, not your gross invoicing.

If you qualify through another scheme without six months registered in Portugal, all registered earnings up to the day before the sick leave are divided by 30 times the number of months with contributions.

Step 2. Apply the percentage for the length of the illness.

The last row cannot apply to you as a self-employed worker. Sickness benefit stops after 365 days in self-employment, so only workers with a longer maximum, such as employees, ever reach the 75% rate.

Where the benefit sits at 55% or 60%, a 5% increase applies if your reference earnings are €500 or less, if your household has three or more dependants under 16 (or under 24 while receiving family allowance), or if it includes dependants receiving the disability supplement.

Tuberculosis is treated separately, at 80% of reference earnings with up to two dependants and 100% with more than two.

Step 3. Check the floor. In 2026 the daily amount cannot be lower than €9.20, which is 30% of a thirtieth of the minimum monthly wage of €920. If your own reference earnings per day come to less than €9.20, you receive your reference earnings instead. The benefit can also never exceed the net value of the reference earnings it was calculated from.

Because the benefit is built on the contribution base you declared, the income you report each quarter has an effect years later. To see how a given level of invoicing feeds through to your contributions and your tax, run the numbers through the Tytle tax profile calculator before you set your declared income.

How long sickness benefit can last

Once you’ve used the maximum period, you need a fresh six-month qualifying period before you can claim again.

Payment can also stop earlier than the certificate says. It ends if the medical board decides you’re fit for work, if you return to work because you feel able to, if you worked during the sick leave even unpaid, if you leave home outside the permitted hours without justification, or if you miss a medical examination.

Sickness benefit can’t be combined with work income, unemployment benefits, parental benefits, or invalidity and old-age pensions. It can be combined with compensation for an occupational disease or a workplace accident, with that compensation deducted from the benefit, and with the Rendimento Social de Inserção.

What happens when the work dries up rather than when you fall ill is a different benefit with different conditions, covered in our guide to unemployment benefits for freelancers in Portugal.

How much does parental benefit pay, and for how long?

Initial parental benefit is paid from the first day, with no waiting period, and no contributions are due while it runs. Parents choose 120 days at 100% of reference earnings or 150 days at 80%. Sharing the leave adds 30 days to either option. The 120-day option then stays at 100%, and the 150-day option rises to 83%, or to 90% with a longer exclusive share.

Initial parental benefit treats self-employed parents far better than sickness benefit does. It’s paid from the first day of impediment to work, with no waiting period, and you owe no contributions for the whole benefit period.

The qualifying period is the same six months. A lighter rule applies to the mother’s 42 mandatory days and the father’s 28 mandatory days: work with contributions in at least one of the six months before you stop working. Parents then choose between two basic lengths, and sharing the leave adds two further options.

The 30 extra days are granted when each parent takes, exclusively and not at the same time, 30 consecutive days or two blocks of 15 consecutive days, after the mother’s 42 mandatory days. The 90% rate applies when that exclusive share is 60 consecutive days or two blocks of 30 days instead.

Two extensions matter. With a multiple birth, the 120 or 150 days increase by 30 days for each additional child. With a premature birth at 33 weeks of gestation or earlier, all the days the baby spends in hospital are added, plus 30 days after discharge.

In 2026 the daily parental amount cannot be lower than €14.32, which is 80% of a thirtieth of the indexante dos apoios sociais (IAS). The IAS is the reference index used across Portuguese social benefits, and it’s set at €537.13 for 2026. In Madeira and the Azores the amount increases by 2%. Reference earnings are calculated exactly as they are for sickness benefit.

The father’s own leave

The father’s leave sits outside the shared pool and is always paid at 100% of reference earnings, whichever option the parents chose. The mother’s 42 mandatory days after the birth are hers in every option.

• 28 mandatory days, taken in blocks of at least seven consecutive days within the first 42 days after the birth. At least seven of them must be taken immediately after the birth.
• 7 optional days, consecutive or not, taken while the mother is receiving her benefit.
• With a multiple birth, both periods increase by two working days for each additional child.

Two rules self-employed parents can’t use

The first is combining the leave with part-time work after the first 120 days, which is written for parents with an employment contract under the Labour Code. The second is the compensatory payment for holiday and Christmas subsidies: self-employed workers are not entitled to it, because those subsidies don’t exist in self-employment. Our comparison of green receipts and an employment contract covers the wider trade-offs.

What happens to your invoicing and contributions while the benefit runs?

Your activity stays open throughout. You don’t have to close or suspend it, and the quarterly declarations continue in January, April, July and October. During sick leave you still pay contributions for the first 10 days, then stop from the eleventh. During parental benefit you owe no contributions at all. And you can’t work while sickness benefit is running.

Stop working, and say so if you don’t

You can’t work while you receive sickness benefit. The entitlement ends if you worked during the certified period, even if nobody paid you for it. You must inform Segurança Social within five working days if you work, change address, start receiving a pension or compensation, or anything else happens that affects your right to the benefit.

While a sick note is open you may only leave the house for medical treatment, or between 11:00 and 15:00 and between 18:00 and 21:00 if the doctor authorised it on the certificate. You must attend any medical examination you’re called to. If you recover early and want to go back to work, say so through Segurança Social Direta under Doença > Cuidados na doença > Comunicar regresso, or with form GIT 69.

Invoicing and contributions

Neither benefit requires you to close or suspend your activity. The quarterly declaration cycle also continues: you still declare income by the last day of January, April, July and October for the previous three months.

Contributions behave differently in each case:

• Sickness. You still pay contributions for the first 10 days of sick leave, except where there is a hospital admission or tuberculosis. From the 11th day you stop contributing and start receiving the benefit. If you go back to work outside a declaration month, you only owe contributions for the days you will actually work that month.
• Parenthood. You owe no contributions at all for the whole parental benefit period.

Keeping the activity, the declarations and the payment dates in order is what keeps the entitlement alive, since a debt at the wrong moment blocks payment. Tytle’s freelancer setup and green receipts management covers the registration, the quarterly declarations and the deadlines, and our guide to filing taxes as a freelancer in Portugal shows how the pieces fit together.

Claiming sick pay and parental benefit: routes, forms and documents

Sickness benefit

There is nothing to apply for in the normal case. The certificado de incapacidade temporária (CIT), the temporary incapacity certificate your doctor issues, is sent electronically by the health service to Segurança Social, and the benefit is processed automatically.

A paper certificate is accepted only where electronic transmission is impossible, and it must reach Segurança Social within five working days of being issued. A late delivery doesn’t destroy the entitlement, but payment then runs from the delivery date to the end of the certified period, with the 10-day waiting period still deducted. Two extra forms exist for specific cases: the household declaration GIT 35 for tuberculosis, and the accident declaration GIT 37.

Parental benefit

This one you must request. Submit it online through Segurança Social Direta under Família > Maternidade e paternidade, at any Segurança Social office, or by post to your district centre. The main forms are RP 5049 and its continuation sheet RP 5049/1. The documents depend on when you claim:

The deadline is six months from the first day you stopped working. Claim later than that and the time beyond six months is deducted from the payment period. If you’re paid something you weren’t entitled to, you have 30 days from the notification to return it.