When your own entitystarts to make sense.
A Portuguese entity earns its keep when the team is settled, the company will trade here for years, and somebody is ready to carry the manager duties. Teamed will tell you plainly when you are not there yet.
Start here
Four questions that decide it before the money does
Most people arrive at this question with a spreadsheet, and in Portugal the spreadsheet is especially misleading. Incorporation is cheap here, 220 euro with standard articles, which makes it look like an easy yes. The cost that matters is what comes after.
Will you still be hiring here in three years. Setting up is paid once and earns back slowly. If your plan for Portugal is shorter than the payback period, the arithmetic never closes.
Must you be the legal employer. Some contracts, licences and public tenders require it outright. When one of those applies, cost stops being the question.
Will the company make a trading profit here. An entity brings corporation tax, a certified accountant and an annual filing calendar. That is worth having when there is profit to report and a burden when there is not.
Who carries the manager duties. A named gerente takes on real legal responsibility that does not go away if things go wrong. If you cannot name that person today, you are not ready to file.
Any no is a stay signal, whatever the cost maths says.
The number everybody asks for
There is no headcount that works everywhere
The question usually arrives as a number. At how many people does an entity become worth it. There is no honest single answer, and any provider quoting one across countries is quoting a marketing figure rather than a calculation.
It moves with salary levels, with how much employer cost a country adds on top, with what professional help costs locally, and with how long you intend to stay. Portugal skews the maths in a particular way: cheap to open, and carrying a mandatory certified accountant afterwards. So the crossover here sits somewhere quite different from a country with the opposite shape.
We do not print a number. The crossover calculator works it out for Portugal using the actual local figures, and it gives you a band rather than a false point.
What changes
What owning the company actually gets you
You become the employer, in name and in law. Contracts are with you, the relationship is yours, and there is no third party in the middle of it. For a team that has settled and is going to grow, that is usually the point.
The company also sits on your balance sheet. It can hold assets, sign leases, apply for Portuguese and European funding, and carry a local trading history that follows it. None of those are available through somebody else's entity.
What you give up is flexibility. An entity is slower to open than a contract and considerably slower to close, and Portuguese employment protection means the people inside it are not easy to unwind either. That asymmetry is the honest reason to be sure before you file.
Worth saying plainly
Staying where you are is a decision, not a delay
If the team here is small, still changing shape, or you are testing whether the market works, an employer of record is very often the better answer. That is not a lesser outcome and we will say so directly rather than steering you towards the larger piece of work.
Teamed does not earn more by moving you sooner, which is why the Graduation Model exists as a path rather than a sales step.
Teamed's employer of record in Portugal is a flat €560 per employee per month, with zero FX mark-up in any currency pairing and one invoice at the end of it. Contractors, employer of record and your own entity all run on one platform, so moving between them later does not mean changing provider or re-onboarding anybody. Real HR and legal experts handle the work, not a ticket queue.
Talk to a member of the team and we will tell you plainly which one suits where you are. If you would rather look at the numbers yourself first, the crossover calculator models it for Portugal.
Who carries it
Your own entity, when it's time. We set it up, migrate you in, and hand it back intact.
Global Entity and Employment Operations, which we call GEMO, is how Teamed forms your company, registers it for corporation tax and payroll, runs it month to month and keeps its filings current, across 100+ countries. You stay the employer. We do the work behind it.
In Portugal that matters a little more than elsewhere, because Teamed employs through its own local entity rather than a partner. The people who would run your company are the people already running ours.
They set up our EU entity and moved hires across without missing a payroll.
Questions
Questions about making the call
At what headcount should we open a Portuguese entity?
There is no single number that holds across countries. Portugal is cheap to open and carries a mandatory certified accountant afterwards, so its crossover sits differently from most. The calculator works it out.
Is it not cheap enough to just do it?
Incorporating is cheap, at 220 euro with standard articles. Running the company is not, and that is the part that repeats every year.
Can we change our mind afterwards?
You can close a company, but it is slower and more involved than opening one, and Portuguese employment protection means the people inside it are not simple to unwind either.
Do we have to move everyone at once?
No, though a single transfer date is simpler to run and easier for people to understand than a staggered one.
What is the tax rate we would pay?
19% on profit for 2026, falling to 17% by 2028, with 17% on the first 25,000 euro for smaller companies and a municipal charge on top.
Sources
- Ministerio da Justica, company registration fees and share capital
- Governo de Portugal, the IRC reduction schedule to 2028
- Codigo do Trabalho, employment protection and severance
The rest of the Portugal guides
Looking for a job in Portugal yourself? Teamed does not hire people directly. Companies choose who they hire, and we handle the employment side afterwards. Here is why we cannot help with your search.
