Create a company in Cyprus — or move your company from Portugal

The most repeated claim about leaving Portugal is that there is no exit tax, and the second most repeated is that there is one. Both are wrong. Art. 10.º-A CIRS recaptures gains you already rolled over and nothing else, which means the answer depends entirely on what you did to your shareholding years ago.

Updated for 2026 Cyprus tax law and regulations.

One partner for the Portuguese departure file and the Cyprus company you are opening

Sumly is the one-stop, fully digitalized way to create a company in Cyprus, relocate a business you currently run from Portugal, and operate it from the day it exists. The registration is ours to file, your books open on the day you order, every Cyprus return is prepared box by box, and the Yellow Slip, the tax residency registration and the non-dom application are fixed-price services on the same invoice. One provider, one dashboard, prices published in advance — instead of a contabilista certificado for one half of the move, an advogado for the other, and nobody at all holding the join.

This is Sumly — and what we actually do for you

Sumly is the fully digital provider for founders moving a company to Cyprus. You do not need to learn Cypriot company law, find a local auditor, or work out which form goes where. You get in touch, and we do the rest.

And we stay with you on both sides of the move. The Cyprus side we own outright. For the side you are leaving, we put you straight in front of an adviser or lawyer from our network who works on exactly your problem — company law, exit taxation, inheritance, employment — and we hold the thread between them and us. One point of contact for the whole move, however many specialisms your case turns out to touch. If your case is simple, we do all of it for a fixed price.

Part 1: What leaving actually costs you

Your home country does not let go the moment the plane does. What still runs after you have left, and in which order it has to be handled.

Does Portugal charge an exit tax when a founder moves to Cyprus?

Not on shares you have simply held. Portugal has no general deemed-disposal charge on unrealised gains when an individual stops being resident, and that puts it in a much smaller group of European countries than most founders assume. What it has instead is a narrow recapture rule, and the difference decides whether your move costs six figures or nothing at all.

The provision is art. 10.º-A CIRS, headed Perda da qualidade de residente em território português. Read what it actually reaches: where a shareholder loses Portuguese resident status, the amount treated as a capital gain is the value which, by virtue of those provisions, was not taxed at the time of the share exchange, the merger or the demerger. The triggering events are a permuta de ações, a fusão, a cisão, or a transfer of a business into a company under art. 38.º CIRS. Every one of them is a reorganisation in which Portugal let a gain go untaxed on the promise of taxing it later. Leaving is the later.

So the question is not "does Portugal have an exit tax". The question is whether there is a deferred gain sitting inside your shareholding at all:

This is the sentence to take to your Portuguese adviser, and it is the one the competing pages get wrong in both directions. The English-language page closest to this search asserts flatly that a Portugal-to-Cyprus move requires no exit tax calculation, which is true for most readers and badly false for the founder who did a share swap in 2021. Meanwhile a great deal of Portuguese-language commentary reads across from Spain, France or Germany and warns about a broad charge on share value that Portuguese law does not impose.

Are you moving yourself, or moving the company out of Portugal?

Answer this before you incorporate anything, because it is the fork that decides whether art. 83.º CIRC is in play, and once you have chosen a route it is expensive to change your mind.

Art. 83.º CIRC applies when a Portuguese company transfers its own residence abroad. On that transfer, the taxable profit of the final period picks up the differences between market value and tax book value of all assets, even where those assets are not reflected in the accounts. That last clause is the whole story for a services or software business. Self-generated goodwill, a customer book, brand value and internally developed software have never appeared on the balance sheet, so nothing about a clean set of accounts limits the charge. The exit value is what the assets are worth, not what they cost.

Because Cyprus is an EU member state, the payment can be spread. Where the transfer is to another member state — or an EEA state with mutual recovery assistance — the company may elect to pay in equal annual instalments corresponding to one fifth of the amount, starting in the year of the transfer.

Now the practical point. Most founders who relocate to Cyprus never touch art. 83.º, because they do not move the Portuguese company anywhere. They incorporate a fresh Cyprus company, move the trade, the contracts and themselves across, and then either keep the Portuguese entity for its legacy business or wind it down on a Portuguese adviser's timetable. That route is a personal relocation plus a new incorporation. The article addresses a corporate migration, which is a different transaction with a different bill.

Do Portuguese CFC rules catch a Cyprus company?

They can, and the answer turns on substance rather than on the rate — which is the opposite of what most of this search will tell you. The regime is art. 66.º CIRC, the imputation of income from non-resident entities subject to a privileged tax regime, and practitioners simply call it regras CFC.

Three gates have to be passed before anything is attributed to you.

The first is control. Art. 66.º engages where a Portuguese resident holds, directly or indirectly, at least 25% of the capital, the voting rights or the rights to income of the non-resident entity. A founder-owned company clears that on day one.

The second is the low-tax test, and here the arithmetic is worth doing on the page rather than gesturing at. The entity is treated as being under a privileged regime where it sits in a blacklisted territory, or where the tax on profits actually paid is lower than 50% of the tax that would be due under this Code. With IRC at 19% for 2026, half of it is 9.5%. Note the words efetivamente pago — the test measures tax actually paid, not the statutory rate on the letterhead:

That middle and bottom row are why this guide will not sell you the IP Box unconditionally. It is the single largest item in a Cyprus product company's tax position, and for a founder who has genuinely moved it is straightforwardly available. For a founder who is still Portuguese resident, pushing the effective rate to 3% is exactly what walks the company into the low-tax limb of art. 66.º.

Which brings the third gate, and the reason the answer is still usually favourable. Art. 66.º is disapplied where the entity is established in another EU member state and carries on an economic activity of an agricultural, commercial, industrial or service nature, using personnel, equipment, assets and premises. Cyprus is an EU member state, so the carve-out is directly available — but read the four nouns. Personnel. Equipment. Assets. Premises. A registered office and a nominee signature satisfy none of them.

For a Cyprus company, in other words, CFC is a substance question wearing a rate question's clothes. A company with a real office in Limassol or Nicosia, people who work in it and directors who actually decide things there is outside art. 66.º whatever its effective rate. A brass plate is inside it the moment the IP Box starts working.

When does Portuguese tax residency actually end?

On your last day of presence, and this is genuinely good news that a surprising number of Portuguese-language pages never mention.

Start with how residence is established. Art. 16.º n.º 1(a) CIRS makes you resident if you spend more than 183 days, consecutive or not, in any 12-month period beginning or ending in the year concerned. That is a rolling window rather than a calendar year, which older guidance frequently misses, and it means a departure in the autumn can still be caught by days counted from the previous winter. Alongside it, n.º 1(b) catches a shorter stay where on any day of that period you had accommodation in Portugal in conditions suggesting a present intention to keep it as a habitual residence. Keeping the flat in Cascais available for your own use can hold you resident on a modest day count.

Then the departure rule that makes Portugal easier to leave than most of its neighbours. Residence ceases from the last day of stay in Portuguese territory, subject to the anti-abuse exceptions in n.os 14 and 16 of the same article. Portugal splits the year. You are taxed as a resident on worldwide income up to that day and as a non-resident on Portuguese-source income afterwards.

That single rule is a planning variable rather than a piece of trivia. The date you physically leave is the date the Portuguese base closes, so a founder who can choose whether a large dividend, a share sale or a bonus falls before or after the departure is choosing between two tax systems for that receipt. It is also why "I will move in January to keep it clean" is usually unnecessary advice in Portugal, whatever it is worth in countries that tax the whole year of departure.

What does the AT need from you on the way out?

Two things get confused constantly here, including by people who file Portuguese returns for a living. Residência fiscal is your substantive status under art. 16.º CIRS. Domicílio fiscal is the address the AT holds for you in the cadastro. They are not the same, and updating one does not perform the other.

Art. 19.º LGT settles the consequence. A change of domicile is ineffective against the tax authority while it has not been communicated to it, and where the change alters your resident or non-resident status the communication window is 60 days. Until the Portal das Finanças record is updated, the AT continues to treat you as resident at your old address and anything it sends there has been validly served.

The good news is the part many pages get backwards. The obligation to appoint a representante fiscal does not apply to persons resident in a member state of the European Union or of the European Economic Area with qualifying cooperation arrangements. Cyprus is an EU member state, so no Portuguese representative is required, and nobody needs to be paid an annual fee to be one. Where a non-EU move is involved, Decreto-Lei 44/2022 additionally allows adherence to the electronic notification service to stand in for a physical representative.

The third document is the one nobody asks for until it is needed: your Cyprus certificate of tax residence, identifying the convention and the period for which you are treated as Cyprus resident. Without it, the AT's default position is that you never stopped being Portuguese.

What does a Portuguese company actually pay in 2026?

Less than nearly every page on this subject says, and the trajectory matters more than the snapshot if you are deciding on a five-year view.

Art. 87.º CIRC now states the IRC rate as 17%, but Law 64/2025 of 7 November 2025 attaches a transitional schedule, so the rate you pay depends on when your tax period begins. The AT publishes the schedule alongside the article: 19% for periods beginning in 2026, 18% in 2027 and 17% from 2028. There is also a reduced rate for smaller companies: 15% on the first €50,000 of taxable base for a taxpayer directly and principally carrying on an agricultural, commercial or industrial activity that qualifies as an SME, with the standard rate on the excess — and subject to EU de minimis state aid limits, which is the condition almost every commercial page drops and the one that matters if you have taken other public support.

Quoting 19% on its own still understates the bill, because the derrama municipal is charged by each município on lucro tributável — on taxable profit itself, not on the IRC charge — so it adds to the rate directly. The AT's 2026 circular lists every municipality and no rate on it exceeds 1.50%; Lisboa levies the 1.50% maximum as its general rate, with separate reduced and sector-based reliefs of its own. Above €1.5m of taxable profit the derrama estadual stacks on as well, at 3%, then 5% above €7.5m and 9% above €35m on the mainland, with lower schedules in the Azores and Madeira.

Put on the Lisboa assumption and a founder-owned trading company in a period beginning in 2026 looks like this:

Say Lisboa out loud when you use those numbers, because a reader in Braga or Setúbal will check. A company in a municipality that levies nothing pays a flat 19% at the standard rate, and across the country the real spread on the standard rate is roughly a point and a half.

One charge is deliberately missing from that table. Portuguese companies also pay tributações autónomas — a separate standing charge on company cars, representation expenses and certain payments that is levied whether or not the company made a profit, and which for an owner-managed business is often the largest single gap between the headline rate and the effective one. We are not publishing a rate table for it here, because the 2026 figures were not verified against an official source for this page and an unsourced percentage has no business on it. Ask your contabilista certificado what your own autonomous taxation came to last year before you compare anything to Cyprus. The number usually surprises people.

What do dividends and share sales cost while you are still Portuguese?

The default is simple and heavy. Capital income obtained in Portuguese territory is subject to withholding as a definitive liberatory rate of 28%. Liberatory means final and discharging: the tax is taken at source, nothing goes on the Modelo 3, and there is no further charge. A penalty rate of 35% applies where the payer is domiciled in a territory on the clearly more favourable regime list. We are not asserting anything about whether that list reaches or excludes any particular country, because the portaria itself was not read for this page — take that specific question to a Portuguese adviser rather than to a blog.

Now the part that is genuinely useful and that almost nobody writes down. Instead of the flat 28% a resident may elect englobamento, aggregating the income into the progressive IRS assessment, and where they do, art. 40.º-A CIRS counts profits distributed by companies subject to and not exempt from IRC at only 50% of their value. Crucially, n.º 4 of the same article extends that 50% inclusion to profits distributed by an entity resident in another European Union member state meeting the Parent-Subsidiary Directive conditions, on authenticated proof from the source state's authority.

Cyprus is an EU member state. So a shareholder who is still Portuguese resident and draws a dividend from their Cyprus company can, in principle, elect englobamento and have half of it enter the progressive base rather than all of it meet a flat 28%. Whether that is a win is arithmetic, not ideology: at moderate total income it can beat the flat rate comfortably, and at the top marginal rate it does not. Model it against your actual year rather than adopting it as a rule.

Share sales run on a similar surface with a sharper trap underneath. The positive balance of gains over losses on share disposals is taxed at 28% — but aggregation becomes mandatory, not optional, where the assets were held for less than 365 days and the taxpayer's taxable income including that balance reaches the top IRS bracket. A high-earning founder who flips a holding inside a year does not get the flat rate. They get the top progressive rate, whether they wanted englobamento or not.

There is one more Portuguese rule worth knowing precisely because it argues against leaving. A Portuguese company receiving dividends can exclude them from taxable profit under the participation exemption where it holds at least 10% of capital or voting rights, uninterruptedly during the year preceding the distribution, and the payer is subject to a qualifying tax — including one whose legal rate is not below 60% of the IRC rate. With IRC at 19%, that threshold is 11.4%. A Cyprus company on its ordinary corporate charge clears it, and the Parent-Subsidiary route covers it independently. A Portuguese holding company can therefore receive Cyprus dividends free of IRC, which means a founder does not have to choose one country's structure over the other's as a matter of principle.

Does Portugal tax wealth, and does that follow you to Cyprus?

Portugal levies no net wealth tax. There is no annual charge on your total assets, no imposto sobre a fortuna, and nothing resembling the Spanish Patrimonio or the Norwegian formuesskatt. Say that plainly, because a founder shopping between departure countries will have been told otherwise.

What exists is AIMI, the additional charge on municipal property tax, and it is a partial wealth tax confined to Portuguese real estate. The base under art. 135.º-C CIMI is the sum of the rateable values of urban property held on 1 January, less €600,000 where the taxpayer is an individual. The rates in art. 135.º-F run 0.7% for an individual, 1% on the slice between €1,000,000 and €2,000,000 and 1.5% above €2,000,000, with 0.4% for companies and 7.5% for property held through an entity in a blacklisted jurisdiction. Property owned by a company but put to the personal use of a shareholder or board member is pushed onto the individual scale. The AT's own guidance states that the bracket values double for married couples and de facto partners who opt for joint AIMI taxation.

Here is the part that belongs in a departure guide rather than a property guide. AIMI attaches to Portuguese real estate regardless of where the owner lives. Moving to Cyprus does nothing to it. If you keep the Lisbon apartment, you keep the AIMI, you keep the IMI underneath it, and rental income from that property remains Portuguese-source and Portuguese-taxed after your residence has ended. This is the most common misconception on the subject, and it is why the property decision is part of the departure decision rather than something to settle later.

Cyprus, for its part, levies no annual net wealth tax and no inheritance tax at all. There is no AIMI equivalent and no January valuation date to plan around.

What happens to inheritance and gifts when a Portuguese family leaves?

Portugal abolished inheritance tax, and what replaced it is unusually mild inside the family — which is a genuine reason for some readers to stay, and worth conceding before it is used against the rest of this page.

Gratuitous acquisitions are charged to Imposto do Selo at 10% under verba 1.2 of the general table. But art. 6.º of the Stamp Duty Code exempts the spouse or de facto partner, descendants and ascendants on gratuitous transfers subject to verba 1.2. Spouse, registered partner, children and parents pay nothing. Siblings, nephews, unregistered partners and unrelated beneficiaries pay the 10%.

For a nuclear-family founder that makes Portugal one of the most benign succession jurisdictions in Western Europe, and moving does not improve it — Cyprus has no inheritance tax either, so the two are level on the family case and Portugal is only worse outside the immediate family. If succession is the thing driving your interest in relocating, the honest answer is that it should not be.

Is IFICI a reason to stay in Portugal?

For most readers of this page, no — and not for the reason the internet gives.

The old NHR regime is closed to new entrants. Its replacement is IFICI, the tax incentive for scientific research and innovation, at art. 58.º-A EBF. Its terms are real and in places generous: a special rate of 20% on net employment and self-employment income earned inside an eligible activity, for 10 consecutive years, with foreign-source income exempt across the categories other than pensions.

Two conditions decide who actually gets it. The first is that the applicant must not have been Portuguese tax resident in any of the five preceding years. That is the whole answer for a founder living in Portugal today: you are not eligible, and you cannot become eligible without first being non-resident for five years. IFICI is a regime for people arriving in Portugal, not for people already in it. Anyone presenting it to a current Portuguese resident as an alternative to relocating has not read the condition.

The second is that it is activity-gated rather than status-based. The eligible categories cover higher-education teaching and scientific research, qualified roles in entities carrying out productive investment or recognised as being of national economic relevance, highly qualified professions in innovative and export-oriented companies, R&D personnel, roles in startups, and activities in the Azores and Madeira, with enrolment routed through sector bodies rather than granted by the AT on request. A consultancy, a holding company or a business outside those tracks simply does not qualify. That is the realistic outcome for a large share of readers, and it is the second thing that separates IFICI from the NHR it replaced.

For completeness, the AT's published guidance also records that anyone who previously benefited from the NHR regime is barred from IFICI, as is anyone electing the ex-residents regime in art. 12.º-A CIRS. Two roads that look like alternatives turn out to be mutually exclusive.

What does the Portugal–Cyprus treaty actually do?

Less than the tables suggest, and something more important than the tables show.

The convention was approved by Resolução da Assembleia da República n.º 89/2013 of 1 July, published by Aviso n.º 87/2013 and in force since 16 August 2013. The AT's practical table of conventions gives the reduced rates as 10% on dividends, 10% on interest and 10% on royalties.

In practice those caps rarely do any work on the Cyprus-to-Portugal leg, because Cyprus does not levy withholding tax on dividends paid out to non-residents in the first place, and qualifying corporate holdings are covered by the Parent-Subsidiary Directive independently of any treaty. A cap of 10% on a rate of zero changes nothing.

What the convention does do is provide the machinery for resolving a dual-residence claim and the exchange of information that makes both administrations comfortable. That is the emphasis a Portuguese founder should carry away from it: the treaty is where competing residence claims get settled and where your Cyprus residence certificate does its work, not a source of withholding savings. If you need the tie-breaker ladder in art. 4 applied to your own facts, that is a reading of the convention text with an adviser, and we are not paraphrasing it here.

Part 2: What Cyprus gives you

This is the straightforward half, and the half we build end to end. What you actually get on the other side.

What does the Cyprus side look like for a Portuguese founder?

Flat, and shorter to describe — which is itself part of the appeal after four sections of Portuguese composition arithmetic.

Taxable profit in a Cyprus limited company meets a single corporate charge of 15% from tax year 2026. One rate, no derrama, no municipality to check, no transitional schedule to track across three years. Income from qualifying intellectual property can be brought to an effective 3% from tax year 2026 under the IP Box — which, as the CFC section above sets out, is a benefit for a founder who has genuinely moved and a complication for one who has not.

Then the distribution, which is where the gap against the 28% liberatória opens. A Cyprus tax resident who is not domiciled in Cyprus — the non-dom position nearly every relocating founder qualifies for — pays no Special Defence Contribution on dividends for 17 years, and dividends fall outside Cyprus personal income tax altogether. What is left is GeSY at 2.65% on income up to €180,000 a year, which caps the charge at €4,770 however much is distributed. A shareholder who is Cyprus-domiciled instead pays 5% on dividends from 2026 profits — which is exactly why the non-dom registration is worth doing properly rather than assumed.

Salary, if you take one, runs on personal bands from 0% to €22,000 rising to 35% above €72,000. The Cyprus VAT threshold sits at €15,600 of taxable turnover, and the standard rate once you are inside it is 19% — the same headline figure as the Portuguese IVA you already file. And there is no AIMI equivalent, no net wealth tax and no inheritance tax. If you want the two systems set against each other line by line, that comparison lives at Cyprus vs a Portuguese company — this page is about the journey rather than the scoreboard.

How does a Portuguese founder become Cyprus tax resident, and does the Yellow Slip apply?

Usually through the 60-day rule, and yes — as an EU citizen the Yellow Slip route is open to you, which is an advantage a British or American founder making the same move does not have.

The obvious path to Cyprus tax residence is more than 183 days a year. The alternative asks for fewer days and more commitment on the ground, and it became easier in 2026 when the awkward fifth condition was removed from the 60-day rule. Four remain: at least 60 days in Cyprus; no more than 183 days in any other single state; a business, employment or office in a Cyprus tax-resident person held throughout the year; and a permanent home in Cyprus, owned or rented.

The condition that disappeared was the requirement not to be tax resident anywhere else, and it was the one that made mobile founders nervous, because another state's claim used to disqualify you outright. Competing claims now resolve through the treaty instead. For a Portuguese reader the practical detail is that a directorship of your own Cyprus company can be the office the third condition asks for — so incorporating and establishing residence are one project rather than two, and the same directorship gives the substance question something real to look at. The Yellow Slip is the registration certificate for EU citizens exercising free movement; how the Yellow Slip works covers the documents, and the 60-day rule covers day counting and the certificate you will need to show the AT.

What happens to your Segurança Social record and your Portuguese pension?

This is the section where we tell you what we did not verify, because the alternative is making it up. No Segurança Social figure, form number or duration was confirmed against an official source for this page, so none appears on it.

What can be said at the level of mechanism, without asserting anything unsourced: Portugal and Cyprus are both EU member states, so which system you belong to is settled by the EU coordination rules rather than by Portuguese domestic law acting alone, and a person is subject to one member state's legislation at a time. Contribution periods completed in different member states are taken into account together when a pension entitlement is worked out, so a Portuguese record built over twenty years is not discarded because you finish your career somewhere else. A mechanism exists for people temporarily working in another member state to stay in the sending state's system, and we are deliberately not publishing its conditions or its paperwork here. And a genuinely relocating trabalhador independente moves out of the Portuguese system and into the Cypriot one rather than running both.

Put the question to Segurança Social directly, in writing, before you go. It is quick while you still hold a Portuguese address and a Portuguese login, and slow afterwards. On the Cyprus side, social insurance registration is part of the registrations bundle we handle with the company.

Where Portugal genuinely wins, and who should not leave

A page that only lists reasons to go does not deserve to be believed. These are real, and some of them are better than what the destination offers.

• The corporate rate is falling, not climbing. 19%, then 18%, then 17%, with 15% on an SME's first tranche. Against a Cyprus charge of 15% the gap is far narrower than the stale "12.5% versus 21%" framing that most content still runs on.
• No net wealth tax. Portugal taxes property through AIMI; it does not tax net worth.
• Inheritance inside the family is free. Spouse, partner, children and parents pay nothing.
• No general individual exit tax. A founder who never did a rollover leaves without a deemed-disposal charge — which is not true in Spain, France, Germany, Austria or the Netherlands.
• The year splits on departure. Residence ends on the last day of presence, not on 31 December.
• No fiscal representative is needed for a move inside the EU.
• The participation exemption works in both directions, so a Portuguese holding company can receive Cyprus dividends without IRC.

Notice what that list does to the urgency argument. Portugal is not a country you have to escape before a window closes, and anyone selling the move on panic is selling something else. The honest case for leaving is narrower: the derrama stack, autonomous taxation on owner-manager expenses, a flat 28% on the way out of the company with a mandatory-aggregation trap for short holdings and high earners, and an administrative load that grows with the business rather than shrinking.

Why do people choose Cyprus over other tax havens?

Because it is a place people build an actual life in, which is not true of most names on the same shortlist. The tax is the reason anyone opens the conversation. It is almost never the reason they are still here in year three.

Cyprus has among the lowest violent crime rates in the European Union, and families arriving from a large city usually notice that before they notice anything fiscal. It is an English-speaking country in every way that matters commercially — banking, contracts, professional services and most official dealings run in English, which makes the first six months far shorter than they would otherwise be. The island has been absorbing people from all over the world for long enough that being the newcomer in the room is unremarkable. Business and real estate are both booming, and the administration stays friendly and open towards people who want to trade rather than layering another authorisation over every step. Groceries — meat, fruit, vegetables — are cheap. And the beaches never close: in a Cyprus winter you can still swim, and the summers are what people fly across the world for.

The Portuguese push list is short, specific and sourced above rather than asserted. A corporate rate that has to be assembled from three components before you know it. A municipal surcharge charged on profit itself, at its legal maximum in the capital. A standing autonomous charge on the ordinary expenses of running an owner-managed company, payable in a loss year. A flat 28% on getting money out, with the option of aggregation and a compulsory version of it that catches exactly the high-earning founder who sells quickly. And a compliance calendar in which the Modelo 22, the Modelo 3, the IES and the provisional payments all want different attention at different points of the year.

Can a Portuguese e-commerce brand run through Cyprus?

Yes, and for a Portuguese seller the honest framing is operational rather than about market access — you are inside the single market from Lisbon and from Limassol alike, and we are not going to dress that up as something it is not.

The Cyprus company gets an EU VAT number that any customer can verify in VIES, applies the zero rate to intra-EU business sales on the ordinary conditions, and reports consumer sales across the bloc through the one-stop shop. A buyer in Porto sees nothing different at checkout. What changes is which state taxes the profit, what it costs to get that profit into your own hands afterwards, and how much of the monthly work you still do by hand.

That last part is where online stores actually break. Thousands of small transactions, two or three payment processors, several currencies, and a VAT treatment that flips with the buyer's type and country. Sumly's Shopify and WooCommerce plugins pull orders, refunds, processor fees and payouts straight into the books with the right Cyprus VAT codes already attached, so the return assembles itself from the sales instead of being rebuilt from a spreadsheet in the week it is due. Live bank feeds and multi-currency invoicing carry the rest, and the VAT feature shows the return filling up as the quarter runs.

Two worked examples

A consultancy at €320,000 of annual profit. Through a Lisboa company that qualifies as an SME, IRC takes 15% of the first €50,000 and 19% of the remaining €270,000 — €58,800 — and the derrama municipal adds 1.50% of the whole taxable profit, another €4,800. That leaves €256,400 to distribute, and the 28% liberatória on it is €71,792, so about €184,608 reaches the founder and the combined take is a little over 42%. Through Cyprus the company pays €48,000, the €272,000 distributed to a non-dom meets only GeSY at its €4,770 ceiling, and roughly €267,230 lands. The difference in one year is about €82,600, before autonomous taxation is added to the Portuguese side.

A software company at €700,000 of qualifying profit. In Lisboa, IRC comes to €131,000 and the derrama municipal to €10,500 — the derrama estadual does not engage below €1.5m — leaving €558,500 to distribute and €156,380 of dividend tax, so about €402,120 arrives. In Cyprus, income qualifying under the IP Box is taxed at an effective 3%, which is €21,000, and the €679,000 distributed meets the same €4,770 ceiling, leaving roughly €674,230. At this scale it stops reading as a saving and starts reading as a different business model. Note the condition attached: an effective 3% is below the 9.5% CFC line, so this outcome belongs to a founder who has actually moved and whose Cyprus company has real substance — not to someone running it from an office in Porto.

Both examples assume Lisboa's 1.50% derrama, SME qualification on the first tranche, full distribution and that all IP income qualifies. Your municipality, your salary-versus-dividend mix, your departure date and the state of your shareholding history all move the answer, which is what a meeting is for. The calculator at the top of this page compounds the annual difference, because each year's saving is also invested.

Part 3: How the move runs

From the decision to the first invoice out of the Cyprus company: the order, the mistakes people make before you, and two calculations worked through in full.

What does a move from Portugal look like, month by month?

Every file moves at its own speed, so read this as sequence rather than as dates.

• Before anything is filed — and this is where we start. We put a Portuguese adviser from our network on two facts: whether your shareholding carries a deferred gain that art. 10.º-A would recapture, and whether you are moving yourself or moving the company. Those two answers determine the entire shape of the exit. Together we settle the structure — a standalone Cyprus company, or a Cyprus company alongside a retained Portuguese one — before we incorporate anything.
• Month 1. We order the Cyprus company; the books open the same day, and we open the Yellow Slip file. You take the directorship that anchors the 60-day rule, and we minute the real decisions in Cyprus from the first board meeting rather than from the first audit.
• Months 1–3. We register for VAT and, where relevant, social insurance, employees and UBO, and get banking and EU payments moving. You rent or buy the permanent home the 60-day rule requires, and we tell you what qualifies. We build the substance the art. 66.º carve-out asks for — premises, people, equipment — rather than planning to build it later.
• Around the departure date. We fix the last day of presence deliberately with your adviser, because it closes the Portuguese base. They then update the domicílio fiscal on the Portal das Finanças inside 60 days, and we keep the confirmation on file.
• The first filing season after you leave. Your contabilista files the Modelo 3 for the resident part of the split year and deals with the Portuguese company on their own timetable — not on a redomiciliation salesman's. We apply for the Cyprus tax residency certificate and register you as non-dom.
• The years after. We keep the Cyprus certificate current for each year the AT might ask about. If you kept Portuguese property, your adviser keeps filing for it — AIMI and Portuguese-source rent do not stop because you left.

What mistakes do Portuguese founders actually make?

The expensive ones repeat, and almost none of them are exotic.

Reading "Portugal has no exit tax" on an English-language page and moving without ever checking whether a 2019 share swap left a deferred gain inside the holding. Reading the opposite somewhere else and abandoning a perfectly workable plan over a charge that was never going to apply. Assuming art. 83.º applies to a personal move, and paying for a corporate migration nobody needed. Quoting 21% IRC in a comparison and looking two years out of date to anyone who checks. Quoting 17% instead, which is the codified rate but not the one payable until 2028. Forgetting the derrama entirely and then wondering why the Modelo 22 came out higher than the model. Building the whole case on the IP Box while still Portuguese resident, which is the fastest way into the low-tax limb of art. 66.º. Treating substance as paperwork rather than as premises, people and decisions. Changing the address on the Portal das Finanças and believing that changed the residência fiscal. Leaving the cadastro stale, then losing a dispute by default because the notification went to Lisbon. Keeping the apartment and being surprised by the AIMI. And reading about IFICI as though it were available to somebody who has lived in Portugal continuously for the last five years.

Nearly all of them come from treating the move as one event instead of two tax systems handing over to each other across two or three years.

Part 4: Who does the work

You can do all of this yourself. Below is what that costs in time and in money, against what it costs to let us do it.

Do it yourself — or have Sumly do it

Both routes are real, and the honest question is how much administration you want to carry inside a legal system you have never used while you are simultaneously moving a household. Doing it yourself means the Registrar's forms and fees, a registered office you arrange, VAT and VIES registration, provisional tax twice a year, annual statements, and books that will satisfy an auditor who has never met you. Doing it with Sumly means four published prices: formation from €950 one-time, the software from €39 a month, a Sumly certified bookkeeper at €390 a month, and tax residency with non-dom at €750 per person.

What the €950 covers is worth stating precisely: the name check, all registration paperwork prepared and submitted, the company registered with the Cyprus Registrar of Companies, and your Sumly books opened the day you order. Government expenses are invoiced separately once the application is approved.

The software at €39 a month runs the whole company, whether you are sitting in Limassol or still in Lisbon: invoicing, AI double-entry bookkeeping that books your documents for you, live open-banking feeds, every VAT, VIES, provisional and corporate return prepared box by box, live reports, a document inbox with its own email address, mobile receipt capture that books itself, multi-currency invoicing, team roles and the AI assistant — plus payroll at €15 per employee per month, IP Box tracking at €50 a month, Projects at €10 a month, and the e-commerce plugins.

Sumly offers all of it to everyone: a virtual address with PO box, including digital scanning of your post into the dashboard wherever you happen to be; nominee director and secretary where a structure genuinely calls for them; the Yellow Slip, which as a Portuguese citizen you qualify for; tax residency and non-dom at €750 per person; audit through Partner Auditors; and every registration handled — VAT, social insurance, employees and UBO, filed right the first time.

Each of those is an extra, scoped to your case. Tell us what you need in the meeting and you get one clear package-deal offer covering all of it — the IP Box application included where it fits, since it is complex expert work and precisely the sort of thing that should be looked at with you before anyone quotes a price. No hourly billing, no surprises.

Sumly, a law firm, and a traditional bookkeeping firm

Law firm vs Sumly — and what happens when it gets complicated

Sumly is cheaper and faster, and we work WITH lawyers, not against them. When a case gets too complicated for what Sumly handles directly, we simply connect you with the right expert in exactly the legal field you need help in, and everything gets done according to best practice, always. Either way, it starts the same place: contact us.

For a Portuguese founder that division of labour is the entire point. The Portuguese half — the art. 10.º-A question, the split-year date, the cadastro, what happens to the Lda. — belongs with a Portuguese adviser, and we will say so every time you ask. On the Cyprus half there is one provider to deal with, one dashboard to log into and four prices you can read before you commit. That is what makes Sumly the best choice for Portuguese founders creating a company in Cyprus and relocating the business they already run.

Why is Sumly the best bookkeeping system for a Cyprus company?

Sumly is the best accounting software for a Cyprus limited company — because it is built for exactly one thing, Cyprus tax law: all 16 Cyprus VAT codes mapped to the official VAT return boxes, VIES and provisional tax native, not a localization. We will defend that sentence in front of anyone, and the evidence is underneath it.

The two Cyprus-built alternatives a Portuguese founder will be shown are Cybooks and Balabook. We meet their former customers every week, and what they tell us, again and again: workflows that made simple bookkeeping overly complicated, rough edges and glitches, support that left them waiting — a messy experience they were relieved to leave behind.

On every one of these checkable dimensions, Sumly leads. That is a factual comparison — not a matter of taste.

Each of these is meant literally and we will stand behind every one: best support, best bookkeeping software, best AI for bookkeeping, best bookkeeper, best prices — and all of it done easily. The detail is published rather than claimed: Sumly vs Cybooks and Sumly vs Balabook, plus the international tools a Portuguese founder may already be running in Xero, QuickBooks and Sage.

On the IP Box, one line is worth repeating: the IP Box is the largest single line in a Cyprus product company's tax position — and the easiest one to forfeit through bookkeeping that was never set up for it. The application starts as a conversation, which is why we scope it with you rather than pricing it off a form. The IP Box service page covers what we do on it, and the IP Box feature shows how qualifying income is tracked as it is earned.

What happens when you get in touch

You do not need to have decided anything before you speak to us, and you do not need your paperwork in order.

1. The meeting. Fifteen minutes. You tell us what you own and when you want to move. We tell you which rules at home catch you, and what the Cyprus side costs.
2. We tell you what kind of case you have. If it is simple, we do all of it — company, books, residency, non-dom — at a fixed price. If it is not, we say so immediately and bring in the specialist it needs.
3. We start. The company is registered, your books open the same day, and you have one point of contact for the whole thing.

Questions Portuguese founders ask before they leave

Frequently asked

Does Portugal charge an exit tax when I move to Cyprus?

Not on ordinary founder shares. Art. 10.º-A CIRS is headed loss of resident status and it recaptures only value that escaped tax at an earlier share exchange, merger, demerger or art. 38.º transfer of a business into a company. If you incorporated your company and have held the same shares ever since, there is nothing deferred for the article to catch. If a holding company was inserted above your trading company through a rollover, the untaxed part of that old gain becomes taxable in the year you stop being resident.

Is art. 83.º CIRC the same thing as a personal exit tax?

No, and mixing them up is the most expensive confusion on this subject. Art. 83.º taxes the company, not the shareholder, and only when the company itself moves its residence out of Portugal. It brings the difference between market value and tax book value of every asset into the final period, including assets never recognised in the accounts. Founders who leave a Portuguese company where it is and build a new Cyprus company alongside it never engage the article at all.

What IRC rate does a Portuguese company pay in 2026?

19% on the standard rate, not the 21% almost every English-language page still quotes and not the 17% written in the body of art. 87.º CIRC. Law 64/2025 attaches a transitional schedule: 19% for periods beginning in 2026, 18% in 2027 and 17% from 2028. A qualifying SME pays 15% on the first €50,000 of taxable profit, subject to EU de minimis state aid limits. Derrama municipal is charged on taxable profit on top of all of it.

Will Portuguese CFC rules attribute my Cyprus company's profit to me?

Only if you are still Portuguese resident, you control at least 25%, the tax actually paid falls below half of what Portuguese IRC would have charged, and the EU substance escape fails. With IRC at 19% that half-test sits at 9.5%. A Cyprus company paying the ordinary corporate charge is above it. A Cyprus company sheltered down to an effective 3% by the IP Box is below it, and then only real people, equipment, assets and premises in Cyprus keep art. 66.º out.

When exactly does my Portuguese tax residency end?

On your last day of presence in Portugal, under art. 16.º n.º 4 CIRS, subject to the anti-abuse exceptions in the same article. Portugal splits the year rather than treating you as resident for all of it, so income earned after that date sits outside the Portuguese base. The 183-day test that decides residence in the first place runs over any rolling 12-month period beginning or ending in the year, not over the calendar year, and keeping a home available in Portugal can hold residence on a low day count.

Do I need a fiscal representative in Portugal after I leave?

Not for a move to Cyprus. Art. 19.º LGT excludes people resident in another EU or EEA state from the obligation to appoint a representante fiscal, and Cyprus is an EU member state. What you do owe is the change of domicílio fiscal on the Portal das Finanças within 60 days, because until it is communicated the change has no effect against the AT and notifications sent to your old Portuguese address are validly served.

Can I claim IFICI instead of moving?

Almost certainly not, and this is where most articles mislead. IFICI under art. 58.º-A EBF requires that you were not Portuguese tax resident in any of the five preceding years. A founder living in Portugal today is barred from it for five years by definition. It is a regime for people arriving, not for people already here, and even for arrivals it is activity-gated rather than a status you obtain by moving — the 20% rate applies to income earned inside an eligible activity.

If I keep my Lisbon apartment, what follows me to Cyprus?

AIMI does. The additional charge on Portuguese urban property is levied on the aggregate rateable value held on 1 January, less a €600,000 deduction for an individual, and it is charged on the property rather than on the owner's residence. Leaving Portugal does not shed it. Rental income from the property stays Portuguese-source too. Selling before you go and keeping the proceeds is a different decision from keeping the flat and letting it, and the two produce very different Portuguese filing lives.

Do Cyprus dividends still work if I stay Portuguese resident?

They work better than most people expect. The default is a 28% final withholding, but art. 40.º-A n.º 4 CIRS extends the 50% inclusion rule to profits distributed by a company resident in another EU member state that meets the Parent-Subsidiary Directive conditions, on authenticated proof from the source state. Cyprus qualifies as an EU member state. Whether electing englobamento beats the flat 28% depends on the rest of your income — at the top marginal rate it usually does not.

Does Sumly advise on Portuguese tax?

No. Sumly builds and runs the Cyprus side: the company, the books from day zero, Cyprus VAT, VIES, provisional and corporate returns, the Yellow Slip, and the tax residency and non-dom application. This page sets out Portugal's own published rules, sourced to the Autoridade Tributária, so the shape of the decision is visible before you commit. Whether art. 10.º-A reaches your shares is a question for a Portuguese adviser, and where a case needs one we connect you with expert lawyers from our network.

Keep reading

• Every country's route to Cyprus — the departure guide for wherever you are now
• Cyprus non-dom status — the 17-year exemption in detail
• The Cyprus 60-day rule — day counting and the residency certificate
• Cyprus tax benefits for foreigners — the whole picture in one place
• What changed in the 2026 Cyprus tax reform
• How to register a company in Cyprus and what it costs
• Cyprus vs a Portuguese company — the two systems set side by side

The calculator on this page uses headline rates, an assumed annual return and full distribution of profit, so it shows the shape of the difference rather than your own outcome. Portuguese figures are stated for tax periods beginning in 2026 and assume Lisboa's derrama municipal; Cyprus figures apply from tax year 2026. All Sumly prices exclude VAT, and government expenses on a formation are invoiced separately once your application is approved.