The Cascais Letter · Buyer notes

Utilities in Portugal: four contracts, one delivery van, and what a month of them costs.

Every Portuguese home runs on the same four contracts, and very often on a fifth thing that is not a contract at all: a delivery of drinking water in a bottle the size of a small suitcase. Electricity is a standing charge plus whatever you burn. Gas arrives by pipe or by bottle, and the two have almost nothing in common. Water belongs to your council and cannot be shopped around. Internet turns up in a bundle with television and a mobile phone whether you wanted them or not. None of it is ruinous, but all of it works differently from home, and the surprises live in the differences. Here is how each one is sold, and what the regulators’ own numbers say a month of them costs.

Filed under: Living in Portugal

Electricity: you rent the connection by the day, then pay for what you burn

A Portuguese electricity bill is built in two halves. The first is the potência contratada, the contracted power: a ceiling, measured in kVA, on how much your home can draw at once. Homes sit on tiers from 1.15 to 20.7 kVA, and most live at 3.45, 4.6, 5.75 or 6.9. You pay for the tier every day, whether you use a watt or not, and the higher the tier, the higher the daily charge. Exceed the ceiling, by running the oven, the washing machine and a heater together on too small a tier, and the power cuts until something is switched off. The second half is the energy itself, priced per kilowatt-hour.

On top of that structure sit two choices. The first is the shape of the tariff. A simple tariff charges one price all day. The bi-horário charges less in the vazio hours, the empty hours overnight and at weekends, and more the rest of the day, and households that can push laundry, dishwashing and water heating into the cheap hours do measurably better on it. The second choice is the market. In the regulated market, the price is set by the regulator, ERSE, and the supply comes from the last-resort supplier; about 780,000 customers are still on it. Everyone else, some 5.85 million households, buys in the free market, where EDP Comercial, Galp, Endesa, Iberdrola, Goldenergy and a long tail of smaller names set their own prices and fight with discounts aimed at one half of the bill or the other.

So what does a month look like? ERSE publishes worked examples for the regulated market, recalculated in October 2026. A couple without children, on 3.45 kVA and using 1,900 kWh a year, pays EUR 37.77 a month, taxes and fees included. A couple with two children, on 6.9 kVA and using 5,000 kWh a year, pays EUR 97.73. Free-market offers move around those figures rather than away from them: for a 6.9 kVA home, comparisons run on ERSE’s simulator in September 2026 showed daily standing charges between about EUR 0.40 and EUR 0.73, and energy between about EUR 0.14 and EUR 0.17 a kWh, depending on which half of the bill the discount was aimed at. What moves a real bill away from the examples is heating and cooling. A home heated electrically through a cold January, or air-conditioned through a hot August inland, is a different bill from the annual average the examples describe.

Gas: one word, two completely different products

Gas in Portugal is two products sharing a name. The first is piped natural gas, which reaches a home only where a network runs: Lisbon, Porto, much of the coast, and not much of the interior, and plenty of older buildings everywhere were never connected to it. Where it exists, it behaves like electricity, a contract and a monthly bill, and it usually runs the boiler, the hot water and the hob. ERSE’s regulated examples for the gas year that began in October 2026 put a couple using 1,610 kWh a year at EUR 17.38 a month, and a family of four using 3,407 kWh at EUR 32.53, taxes included. About 431,000 customers stay on the regulated gas tariff; about 1.14 million buy in the free market, often bundled with their electricity on one bill.

The second product is the bottle, the botija, and it remains the normal gas supply for about 2.1 million households, according to DECO Proteste. Butane, in the familiar 13-kilo bottle, runs hobs and water heaters; propane, in larger bottles, is the heating and outdoor fuel. You pay a deposit on the first bottle, then swap empties for full ones at a shop or a petrol station, or have them brought to your door by a delivery round that takes the empty away. Bottled prices are not regulated; each seller sets them, and they have climbed hard through 2026. ERSE’s price monitoring put the average 13-kilo butane bottle at EUR 37.31 in May 2026 and above EUR 37.50 by October, against an efficient price of EUR 33.68 that the regulator calculated in July, so where you buy the bottle now matters more than it used to. Households on the social tariff or on minimum benefits get state help here: the Bilha Solidária scheme pays EUR 25 towards a bottle, for up to two bottles a month, and has been extended to the end of 2026.

If a house you are viewing has a bottle cupboard by the kitchen door and no gas meter, that is not a defect, and it is not a temporary arrangement waiting to be fixed. It is the system, and it works well. It just prices heat differently from piped gas, which is worth knowing before you fall for a house heated entirely by propane.

Water: the one bill you cannot shop around

Water is the exception to everything above. There is no market and no choice. Supply, sewerage and rubbish collection are run council by council, by the municipal operator, EPAL in Lisbon, Águas de Cascais in Cascais, and the bill that arrives carries all three services together. The regulator, ERSAR, adds them up the same way for every council. For a household using 10 cubic metres a month, the average bill across Portugal in 2026 is EUR 34.65 a month: EUR 14.04 of water, EUR 11.26 of sewerage and EUR 9.35 of waste. The spread behind that average is the widest of any bill in this article, from EUR 9.62 a month in the cheapest council to EUR 51.39 in the dearest, which is why a figure from the Lisbon coast will never match one from a village inland.

The shape of the tariff is much the same everywhere: a fixed availability charge for the meter, then consumption charged in blocks that get dearer the more you use, with sewerage charged partly as a percentage of the water bill. In Cascais, on Águas de Cascais’s 2026 tariff, the fixed charges alone come to about EUR 16 a month, EUR 9.84 for water availability and EUR 6.01 for sewerage, before VAT. The water itself costs EUR 0.67 a cubic metre for the first five, EUR 0.99 for the next ten, then EUR 1.65, and EUR 2.66 a cubic metre above 25, with sewerage adding a variable charge of 90 per cent of the water value. Two practical consequences follow. A garden and a pool, which push a house into the top blocks all summer, cost more here than newcomers expect. And a leaking cistern bills you three times: once for the water, once for the sewerage charged on it, and once more through the dearer block it pushes you into.

Internet and phone: everything arrives in one bundle

Telecoms went the opposite way from water. Three big operators, MEO, NOS and Vodafone, sell almost everything as a bundle, and the bundle is the product. NOWO, the fourth name many people still remember, was bought by DIGI, and its new customers now sign with DIGI, whose arrival has cut prices across the market. Fibre is the standard connection in towns and cities and along the coast; coverage is checked by exact address, and one street can be fibred while the next is still waiting. The big operators’ low-cost brands, UZO at MEO, WOO at NOS and Amigo at Vodafone, sell much the same networks for less, with less hand-holding.

At the prices being published in October 2026, a bundle of 1 Gbps fibre and television cost EUR 42.49 a month at MEO and at NOS, and EUR 42.50 at Vodafone, while DIGI and the low-cost brands had the same shape of package at EUR 22 on promotion. Adding a mobile line took the big three to EUR 54.99 a month, EUR 55.50 at Vodafone, and the low-cost end to EUR 25. Fibre on its own, for households that do not want the television, sat at about EUR 30 a month for 1 Gbps. Two habits of this market are worth knowing before you sign. The headline price usually runs for a promotional period and then steps up. And the standard contract at the big three locks you in for 24 months, where DIGI works on three. To sign any of the contracts in this article you will need a Portuguese tax number, the NIF, and a bank IBAN for the direct debit; every utility here asks for the same pair.

A side note on the garrafão: drinking water, delivered

Spend any time in Portuguese homes and you will meet the garrafão: a big returnable bottle, 19 or 20 litres of drinking water, standing on a dispenser in the kitchen with a full one waiting beside it. Tap water in Portugal is safe to drink. The delivery habit is about taste, in a country where much of the tap water runs hard, and about not carrying water up three flights of stairs. It works like the old milk round. A company supplies or rents you the dispenser, drops full bottles on a regular round, and collects the empties to be washed and refilled. Aquaservice delivers 20-litre bottles every four weeks, with the dispenser included and the delivery free. Culligan’s bottles hold 18.9 litres, its rounds are scheduled around the household, and it reckons a household of four gets through a bottle every week or two. Both price the service by plan and quote rather than from a public list. In the Lisbon area, smaller operators deliver faster: AguAqui covers 30 councils around the capital, delivers free by the next working day, and publishes a starting price of EUR 19.89 for two bottles with a pump.

It is the one utility in this article that is entirely optional, and the one your Portuguese neighbours will be most surprised to hear you have not arranged.

The running total: what a month of it comes to

Add the regulators’ reference households together, at the reference consumption each regulator uses, and the shape of a Portuguese utility month looks like this. The telecoms line is the fibre and television bundle; the water line is ERSAR’s 10-cubic-metre household.

Couple (regulator’s profile)Family of four (regulator’s profile)
Electricity€37.77€97.73
Piped gas€17.38€32.53
Water, sewerage and waste€34.65€34.65
Fibre and television bundle€42.49€42.49
Totalabout €132about €207

The swaps move the total more than the suppliers do. Heat and cook with bottles instead of piped gas and the gas line becomes a bottle a month at EUR 37.50 or so, when you use one. Put a mobile line in the bundle and the big three charge about EUR 55 for it; take the bundle from a low-cost brand instead and it falls to EUR 22 to EUR 25. What the table leaves out matters too: condominium fees, insurance, and the garrafão. And one honest caveat. There is no official average Portuguese utility bill, because consumption, council and heating choice move every line. These are the regulators’ own examples, added together, which is a firmer thing than an average invented for an article.

Sources

This is general information about how these services work and what they cost in October 2026, not a quote for your own house. Every figure here is a regulator’s worked example, an operator’s published price or a national average, and your own bills will follow your household, your council and your heating. Energy and telecoms prices move; check the current offer before you sign.
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