Portugal’s «Trabalho XXI» labour reform fell on 19 June 2026, at the first parliamentary vote. It never reached the committee stage.
Nine months of tripartite negotiation, 58 meetings, more than two hundred hours at the table. Nothing came into force.
That leaves a practical problem which a good number of HR functions have not yet closed. For most of a year, organisations were designing shift patterns and schedules around rules that never existed. The individual hour-bank agreement, which the proposal wanted to bring back, remains revoked since Law 93/2019. The extended continuous working day did not pass. Neither did the rules on algorithms in personnel decisions.
So the question returns to where it started, and it is a simple one. What working hours does the Portuguese Labour Code actually permit today, and which arrangement suits which job?
This matters particularly if you run a Portuguese operation from somewhere else. The regime is not a local variation on a European template. It has its own procedural deadlines, and some of them run against the employer by default.
Fixed working hours are the most common and the least examined
The default arrangement. The employer sets the start and end of the normal daily working period and the rest break, within the limits of eight hours a day and forty hours a week. Everyone arrives at nine, leaves at six, eats at one.
Its virtue is predictability. You know who is where at any hour, and that counts in customer-facing work, on a production line, in any operation where one person’s absence stops the next.
The cost is what nobody examines. Applied to roles that do not need it, fixed working hours produce rigidity on one side and overtime on the other. Somebody has to ask permission to arrive fifteen minutes late on a day when it would make no difference to anyone. And whoever stays to finish a task at half past six generates paid overtime, when a different organisation of time would have allowed it to be offset.
Exemption from fixed hours does not remove rest entitlements
This is the most widely misunderstood provision in the Code, and the error nearly always runs in the same direction: treating the exemption as though it removed everything.
It requires a written agreement and is only admissible in the situations the law lists. Typically management, positions of trust or supervisory roles, preparatory or complementary work that does not fit within normal hours, and work performed away from the establishment without immediate supervision. It is not a general clause to be applied to everyone who has been issued a laptop.
Here is the point most often missed. The exemption removes the employee from the maximum limits on the normal working period, but it does not remove the right to daily rest, to mandatory and complementary weekly rest, or to public holidays. An exempt manager may work a ten-hour day without that being overtime. They may not work fourteen days straight.
Then there is payroll. The exemption carries its own additional remuneration, and that remuneration is a permanent cost. It is worth doing the arithmetic before granting it out of habit to every middle manager, because in a good many organisations the problem it was meant to solve would have been better solved with flexibility.
Flexible working hours under Article 56 are a right, not a concession
This is the distinction that prevents the most arguments, and the one most often lost in translation.
In Portugal, «flexible working» carries two meanings. The first is the one set out in Article 56 of the Labour Code, and it is a statutory right, not a policy. It belongs to an employee with a child under twelve, or with a child of any age with a disability or chronic illness living in the same household. Either parent may exercise it, or both. It does not depend on internal policy or on a line manager’s goodwill.
The procedure has deadlines that no employer should be discovering in the middle of a request. The employee applies in writing thirty days in advance, stating the period sought and providing evidence that the child lives with them. The employer then has twenty days to communicate acceptance or refusal, and may only refuse on grounds of imperative operational requirements or the impossibility of replacing the employee. If refused, the employee has five days to respond.
And here is the detail that decides a great many cases: employer silence counts as acceptance.
I will add what the law states expressly and what is nonetheless still ignored in practice. An employee on flexible working hours may not be penalised in performance appraisal or in career progression for having chosen the arrangement. Anyone who runs an annual appraisal cycle should read that sentence twice.
The second meaning is the flexibility an organisation grants by choice, to people who do not have young children. It is perfectly legitimate, and it is currently one of the cheapest retention instruments available. But it is company policy, and it should be communicated as such, so that nobody confuses it with the Article 56 regime and feels misled on the day the conditions change.
Flexible hours with fixed core periods is the model the law itself designs
Read carefully what the Code requires once somebody enters a flexible arrangement and you notice that the legislator did not design open-ended freedom. They designed a band with anchors.
The employer must set one or two mandatory presence periods, together amounting to half the normal daily working period. They must set bands for starting and finishing work, each lasting at least one third of the normal daily period. And they must set a rest break of no more than two hours. The employee may work up to six consecutive hours, ten hours maximum in a single day, with the average weekly duration calculated across four weeks.
In practice: there is a core in which everyone is present, and there are entry and exit bands within which each person organises themselves. Management literature calls this core hours. Portuguese law not only permits it, it imposes it as the structure of the regime, which is unusual enough to be worth noting.
It is also the only model of flexibility that, in my experience, survives contact with a real operation. Without a common core, coordination falls apart: meetings that cannot be scheduled, shifts that never overlap. With a common core, you solve the problem for people without creating one for management.
Working hours in the Portuguese Labour Code: which arrangement, for whom
Fixed hours — roles where being present at a set time is the service itself: reception, counter, production line, continuity shifts, transport running to a published timetable. The choice should follow operational need and not administrative habit.
Exemption from fixed hours — management and positions of trust, roles without immediate supervision, preparatory or complementary work. Requires a written agreement, carries its own remuneration, does not remove rest entitlements. Grant it on analysis of the role, never on seniority.
Flexible hours — mandatory when requested by an employee with a child under twelve, or with a disability or chronic illness, unless the organisation can demonstrate an imperative requirement. Discretionary, as policy, for everyone else. In both cases, treat the twenty days as a deadline, because silence accepts.
Flexible hours with fixed core periods — the arrangement to use by default in administrative, technical and office roles. It gives people room, keeps the coordination core intact, and it is the structure the Code itself imposes once the regime is triggered.
The part no company circular solves
Deciding this is straightforward. Operating it is not.
Four working-hours arrangements in one organisation mean four sets of rules for calculating attendance, four ways of distinguishing overtime from time off in lieu, four ways of handling an absence. When rosters live in a spreadsheet, clock-ins in another system and payroll in a third, the gap between what was agreed and what was paid shows up at month end. It shows up as a correction, which is the most expensive way to find an error.
The Code permits all of these working hours arrangements, and permits them simultaneously. The open question is a different one: does the system that has to execute them know how to tell them apart, without somebody working it out in their head?
Where UnikPeople comes in
UnikPeople is a Portuguese human resources platform that holds time and shift management, attendance and payroll in the same database. That unification is what allows all four arrangements to be handled at once, rather than reconciled at month end.
Every employee carries their own working hours arrangement: fixed, exempt, flexible, or flexible with fixed core periods. The rules that follow from it apply on their own, including what counts as overtime and what counts as time off in lieu, the mandatory presence periods, the daily limits, and the average calculated over the correct reference period.
A working hours arrangement changes mid-month. A shift is swapped over the phone at six in the morning. A flexibility request is granted. In each case payroll follows, with a full audit trail of who changed what and when. Dynamic management in the literal sense: the change is entered once and propagates, instead of being transcribed three times.
The platform tracks legislation in force and is updated as that legislation moves. 2026 has shown why this matters: a labour reform rejected in June, a pay transparency directive applying without any national law published, European obligations with dates sliding. Organisations that hold these rules inside the system do not push the work out into spreadsheets maintained by hand.
UnikPeople currently processes around EUR 8 million in salaries a month, for more than 7,000 employees. To see how it would be configured for a specific operation, start here: uniksystem.com/unikpeople-hr-employee-portal-and-payroll
Legal note: this article describes the Portuguese Labour Code as in force in August 2026, following the parliamentary rejection of the «Trabalho XXI» proposal on 19 June 2026. It does not replace legal advice on a specific case, and the collective bargaining instruments applicable to each sector may set their own more favourable rules.
Eva Winter for UnikPeople by Uniksystem