Where should IT specialists look for work in Portugal, how should they read a local job offer, why might they need Portuguese, and why is artificial intelligence showing up in job requirements even where it wasn’t mentioned at all until recently? We put these questions to recruiters and employers. The starting point was the experience of the people in our previous piece — Kirill Monyushko, Maria Anisimova and Anna Shavyrina, who had to find new jobs while already living in Portugal. All of them ran into a market that looks healthy from the outside but turns out to be more complicated from within: the search takes months, and local salaries can differ significantly from international ones. Xpat.Land correspondent Ekaterina Dobrynina explains what lies behind their stories and what the Portuguese IT market looks like from the other side — through the eyes of those who hire.
How much do employers in Portugal pay?
IT specialists in Portugal have several options: Portuguese tech companies and outsourcing firms, local offices of international corporations, in-house IT teams at businesses in other sectors, and remote work for a foreign employer. Salaries vary between them, but you can’t draw a simple line between “local companies pay little, international ones pay a lot.”
According to Igor Bessonov, founder of OceanSource, senior developers in Portuguese outsourcing may be offered around €56–60k a year, while some international offers go as high as €80–90k. At the Portuguese offices of international companies, senior developers are offered roughly €55k to €100k gross a year. For example, an international fintech’s range for a senior developer is €55–70k, a large American tech company’s is €66–91k, and a British product company’s is €75–100k. In some senior vacancies, the upper limit reaches €120k a year.
A separate market is in-house IT teams at companies whose core business is, for example, travel, energy, insurance or finance.
According to anonymous salary data from Teamlyzer, senior developers at such companies reported earnings of roughly €37–75k gross a year in 2026, and up to €80k in lead roles.
Some sectors report even lower figures.
So when job hunting, it makes sense to look not only at where the employer is from, but also at the type of company, the specific role and the structure of the compensation.
There’s more to an offer than salary
In Portugal, an employee’s total income may be made up of several parts. On top of the base salary, an employer may, for example, pay a separate meal allowance — subsídio de refeição. This payment enjoys tax advantages, and the tax-free limit depends on whether the money is paid directly or via a special card.
According to Elena Politaeva, HR director at Smart Travel Software LDA, this kind of compensation structure is fairly common in Portugal, especially at international companies. Besides the base salary, employers may offer other benefits too.
What goes into the package depends on market practice, competition for staff, corporate policy and the tax treatment of individual payments.
“It’s not necessarily just about tax optimisation. It’s more a combination of several factors,” Politaeva notes.
At OceanSource, however, they point out that complex compensation packages can’t be considered a feature of the entire Portuguese IT market. So when comparing offers, it’s best to find out separately which amounts are allowances, what conditions they depend on, and what counts as fixed salary, which in Portugal is paid 14 times a year. Xpat.Land has already explained how these 14 payments work.
The salary structure matters for more than day-to-day expenses. When applying for a mortgage, for example, a bank may assess your verified income differently from how you yourself value your overall compensation package.
If the bank doesn’t count some payments as regular income, the amount you can borrow may turn out to be lower. So if you’re planning to buy a home, it’s worth finding out in advance which salary components a particular bank takes into account when assessing your ability to repay.
This is one case where two offers with the same total value may not be quite equal for the employee.
An employee costs a company more than their salary
If for candidates the challenge is to understand the structure of an offer, for businesses it’s a different problem: the full cost of hiring.
Xpat.Land spoke to the owner of a small LegalTech service operating in Portugal, who asked that neither his name nor the project be disclosed. According to him, one reason his company prefers service contracts to employment contracts is the employer’s additional costs. The entrepreneur himself put these at roughly “another 50%” on top of the salary. That doesn’t mean half the salary automatically goes to the state. The standard employer contribution to Segurança Social is 23.75%, while another 11% is deducted from the employee’s own salary.
If the base salary is €2,000, the employer pays €28k over a full year in 14 salary payments. The company’s Segurança Social contributions add another €6,650. In total, salary and social contributions come to €34,650 a year. On top of that there may be accident insurance, equipment, allowances and other costs.
Overtime is regulated separately too: in Portugal it is paid at a higher rate, with the premium depending on the number of overtime hours and on whether the work falls on a regular working day, a rest day or a public holiday.
For small companies, this economics becomes one of the arguments in favour of B2B and working with external contractors. But these savings have their limits.
If a contractor on a service agreement in fact works like a regular employee (to the company’s schedule, on its equipment, reporting to a manager, at premises belonging to the client, and for regular pay), Portugal may decide that the parties have an employment contract.
In that case, the employer risks a fine and a demand to compensate the worker retroactively. In 2024, the labour inspectorate notified almost 10,000 companies that it suspected them of such arrangements.
Working without a language barrier
The choice of employers in Portugal isn’t limited to Portuguese companies and large international ones. There are also businesses founded or relocated here by Russian-speaking entrepreneurs.
Kristina Varfolomeeva of OceanSource has observed that companies that moved to Portugal from Russia and other CIS countries often keep their familiar talent pool at first.
“They will still give some preference to specialists from CIS countries, but at the same time they’ll integrate into Europe,” says Kristina Varfolomeeva, co-founder of OceanSource.
As they grow, these companies start building more international teams and hiring local staff too. For Russian-speaking specialists, this segment can be another avenue for job hunting — somewhere between the fully local market and international corporations.
Xpat.Land has already looked at an example of this kind of expat entrepreneurship in a piece about the startup Rippla.
English may be enough, but Portuguese widens your options
For professional work in IT, English is often enough. But not speaking Portuguese does reduce the number of companies open to you.
Anna Shavyrina, an IT recruiter, says this isn’t only about the requirements of a particular role. In her experience, language may matter to a local employer because of the team’s everyday life: office conversations, team meetings, jokes and other informal communication. So even when clients are international and the working language is English, a Portuguese-speaking candidate sometimes gets an extra edge.
There’s no universal rule, though. At Smart Travel Software, according to Elena Politaeva, a candidate’s nationality as such was not a hiring criterion. The company looked primarily at experience, fit for the role, level of English, the necessary documents and the candidate’s sense of responsibility.
So not speaking Portuguese doesn’t shut you out of the IT market, but knowing the language increases the number of companies where you can compete on equal terms with local specialists.
Allow several months for your job search
Even a good search strategy doesn’t mean you’ll find a job within a few weeks.
“You need to prepare yourself mentally, find some kind of zen and not panic for six months if you can’t find a job,” says IT recruiter Anna Shavyrina.
In her experience, two to three months used to be a normal search time; now the process often takes longer.
This leads to some rather down-to-earth advice: prepare for the search not only professionally but also financially. If possible, it’s better to have savings for at least a few months and to know in advance the minimum income you can accept.
That way you can compare offers, clarify the salary structure and avoid accepting the first offer just because the rent is due next week.
AI is becoming a new hiring filter
Another change has less to do with Portugal than with the transformation of the IT market itself.
At the anonymous LegalTech project whose owner Xpat.Land spoke to for this piece, artificial intelligence has already reduced the size of the team. The company used to have a dedicated backend developer, but the founder was able to take over some of their tasks himself with the help of AI, and the position was then cut.
At the same time, the requirements for the remaining staff have changed. The frontend developer was asked to rebuild their workflow around AI tools, and when hiring someone with a legal background, hands-on experience of automating tasks became an added advantage.
The project’s founder puts it as bluntly as possible: “AI experience on your CV is a must — 200%.”
OceanSource sees a similar trend. Igor Bessonov advises backend developers to show practical integration experience, even if so far they’ve only gained it on a personal project. What matters isn’t the word “AI” in a list of skills, but being able to explain in an interview what the candidate actually did and how the solution worked.
AI is gradually appearing on the other side of the interview table too. Anna Shavyrina says she uses artificial intelligence as an auxiliary tool to assess how well a candidate’s profile or portfolio matches the job requirements. In her words, it doesn’t replace the decision of the recruiter or hiring manager, but it helps speed up initial screening.
The experience of the people in Xpat.Land’s first piece shows why the question “Is there IT work in Portugal?” is too broad. There is work, and IT remains one of the country’s best-paid sectors. But for an expat, a different question matters more: which market exactly are they entering?
A local company may offer less than an international employer, but provide a full Portuguese employment contract. An international company in Portugal may pay significantly more, but competition for those roles is tougher. Companies founded or relocated to Portugal by other expats remain a separate option.
Portugal can be both a place for a local IT career and a base from which a specialist works for foreign markets. Which of these models pays off better depends less on the move itself than on the profession, seniority, language, financial expectations and how widely a person is prepared to search.
