Portugal Electricity Tariff API

How a household electricity price is built in Portugal

Portugal shares the Iberian wholesale market with Spain, and the two countries see the same price whenever the interconnection between them is unconstrained. Retail is fully liberalized and almost all households have moved to market offers, though a regulated tariff remains available as a fallback. One distribution company serves practically the whole mainland, and the regulator sets the network access tariffs that every supplier — regulated or free-market — must pass through.

What a household bill is made of

1. 1

   Energy

   Cleared on the shared Iberian day-ahead market. Free-market suppliers sell fixed-rate products, often with time-of-use variants keyed to the number of metered periods the customer has (single, two-period or three-period), and indexed products that track the market price plus a margin. The regulated tariff is built by the regulator as the sum of the network access tariff, an energy tariff and a commercialisation tariff.

2. 2

   Network charges

   Network access tariffs are fixed annually by the regulator and are included in the final price for every consumer, on both the regulated and the free market. They cover global system use, transmission network use and distribution network use, and split between a per-kWh element and an element charged on contracted power — which is why the contracted power a household picks materially changes its bill independently of consumption.

3. 3

   Taxes and levies

   A special electricity consumption tax charged per kWh, from which social-tariff beneficiaries are exempt, plus a small energy-directorate levy. The bill also carries an audiovisual contribution funding public broadcasting — a fixed monthly amount at its own VAT rate, which belongs on the bill but is not an electricity cost.

4. 4

   VAT

   23% standard on most of the bill, with a reduced rate applied to a first tranche of consumption for households with a small contracted power — so a Portuguese bill routinely carries two VAT rates at once.

Regulation shaping the price

• ERSE fixes the network access tariffs and the regulated tariff annually, alongside multi-year regulatory parameters that set the allowed revenue and rate of return for the network operators.
• The regulated tariff survives as a transitional fallback; the great majority of households buy on the free market, where the same network tariffs are passed through unchanged.
• The social tariff gives eligible vulnerable households a substantial discount on the access and energy components, applied automatically on the basis of benefit entitlement rather than on request.
• Household self-consumption is settled with surplus sold on at a market-linked price rather than through a classic feed-in tariff, with collective self-consumption and energy communities as the framework for shared installations.