The new RJUE (DL 108/2026): what changes in licensing

What RJUE is, and why it matters to you

RJUE is the acronym that comes up any time someone talks about licensing building work: it stands for Regime Jurídico da Urbanização e Edificação — the urban building regime. It’s the law that tells your municipality how to review your project, which administrative route it follows, and how long the process can legally take before you can lay a single brick. If you’re building a house, buying a plot to build on, or legalising an extension, it’s this regime — not the PDM (municipal master plan), not the architecture project — that decides the deadlines and the steps between deciding to build and holding the building permit (alvará) in your hand.

The two dates that matter

Decree-Law 108/2026 was published on 29 May 2026 and takes effect on 3 August 2026. Between the two dates there’s a little over two months — short, in practice, for most municipalities to adjust internal procedures, forms and response deadlines. It’s being described as the most far-reaching overhaul of the RJUE in decades, which means anyone filing a project before or after 3 August may find different rules applying to the same type of work.

The promise of the reform is simple to state: less waiting for anyone who wants to build. In practice, the first few months tend to be the opposite — municipal councils interpreting the new regime as projects come in, with no track record of similar cases to lean on.

The three licensing routes, reshaped

The RJUE has always distinguished work that needs a licence application — the municipality approves before you start — from work that only needs a prior-notice procedure (comunicação prévia), where you inform the council and, once the requirements are met, you start without waiting for an explicit decision. DL 108/2026 flips the default rule: in areas where the urban-planning parameters are actually set out in the local plans, most operations now follow the prior-notice route. Full licensing is reserved for more complex operations or zones without defined parameters — and it gains a useful new feature for anyone building: the partial licence for structural work, which lets the structural build start as soon as the architecture design is approved.

Two calendar changes are worth noting: tacit approval becomes the general rule (the council staying silent within the legal deadline now counts as approval in more procedures), and requests for prior information now carry tight deadlines — 15 days for the simple version, 30 days for the qualified version for most operations, 45 for subdivisions (loteamentos). Work that stays exempt from prior control still includes rebuilding without increasing floor area or volume, energy-efficiency upgrades (panels, insulation, windows), and routine maintenance.

For anyone building a house, the practical question doesn’t change: before you hire anyone for anything, ask your municipality — or the architect signing the project — which route applies to your case and what response deadlines come with it. Don’t assume that what applied to a neighbour who got their licence in 2024 still applies the same way now.

The building’s licensing paperwork enters the contract

One of the changes with the most practical impact for buyers and sellers: DL 108/2026 strengthens the requirement to state the property’s urban title — the licence, the alvará, or proof of prior notice — in property transfer contracts. In other words, the escritura (deed) or the CPCV (promissory purchase contract) has to record under which title the construction was carried out.

This pushes a problem that already existed — but that many people ignored — into plain view: houses or extensions built without a licence, or with unlicensed work, become harder to sell or finance when the seller can’t produce the matching urban title. If you’re buying a house with an extension that “has always been there,” it’s worth asking, before you sign anything, whether that work has the paperwork that legitimises it — exactly the kind of detail covered in the guide on what to check before signing a CPCV.

More enforcement, more legal clean-up

The trade-off for faster licensing is more enforcement afterwards: DL 108/2026 swaps prior control for follow-up control. The municipality now inspects during and after the work is carried out, fines for building without a valid title go up (up to €450,000 for companies), and liability becomes joint and several between the developer, the project authors and the site managers. In the other direction, some deadlines get shorter in favour of legal certainty: the window to declare a licence void drops from 10 to 3 years. If you have old unregularised work, the message is clear — putting it off has become more expensive and riskier than dealing with it now.

What doesn’t change

It’s worth underlining what the reform doesn’t touch, because it’s easy to assume otherwise. Your council’s PDM (municipal master plan) still defines what you can build on a plot — height, land use, setbacks. Municipal licensing fees still run at roughly the same levels as always. And you still need an architecture project and the associated engineering specialities before you submit anything — the new RJUE doesn’t waive that technical work, whichever construction method you choose between traditional, LSF or ICF.

This has a practical knock-on effect worth adding up before you decide to build: the cost of licensing a house, before you lay a single brick, still runs at roughly the following levels.

Item	Minimum	Maximum
Architecture project + specialities	€4,000	€9,000
Municipal fees	€2,000	€7,000
Site management and inspection	€1,000	€3,000
Total before the first brick	€7,000	€19,000

Between €7,000 and €19,000 is the sum many developers forget to add before comparing prices per square metre — and no RJUE reform changes this up-front bill. If you’re weighing this route against buying a ready-built home, the total purchase costs calculator shows the mirror side of that decision.

If you have a project caught mid-transition

The most practical question of all, for anyone filing a licensing request or a prior notice in August or September 2026: do the old rules apply, or the new ones? The answer lives in the decree’s own transitional provisions and in how each municipality reads them — which is exactly why we won’t reduce it to a single sentence here.

The only sensible way forward is to ask your municipality directly, before you file the project, which regime will apply to it — and get that confirmed in writing, not from memory at a counter. If your architect or the technician responsible is already handling the new regime on other ongoing projects, ask them too.

Your next sum

Before deciding between licensing a plot or buying a ready-built home, it’s worth adding up the two sums side by side — what it costs and takes to build versus what it costs and takes to buy, including this €7,000 to €19,000 entry cost that most people forget to count.