How to Receive Your Portuguese Mail While Living Abroad

You left Portugal, but Portugal did not stop writing to you. Banks send cards and contract changes, Finanças sends assessments and access codes, Segurança Social sends statements, insurers send renewals, condominiums send minutes, and AIMA sends notifications with deadlines attached. All of it goes to a Portuguese address, and the whole system quietly assumes somebody is standing behind that letterbox.

There are exactly four ways to be that somebody. This guide is the honest version of each one, including the two we do not sell.

Option 1: a relative or friend collects your post

The default, and free. It also has the worst failure mode, because it depends on a person having time, being in the country, and being willing to open your bank correspondence and tell you what it says. It fails in the specific week it matters: holidays, illness, a move, or simply an envelope left on a hall table because it looked unimportant. If you are the person who calls a sibling twice a year asking them to photograph a letter, you already know the cost of this option is not zero.

Option 2: CTT reexpedição (official mail forwarding)

CTT, the national postal operator, forwards correspondence from a Portuguese address to another address, including one abroad, for fixed periods. You pay a fixed fee for the period, plus an extra amount for each item forwarded internationally, and CTT asks you to name a contact person in Portugal who is responsible for paying those extras.

Most people assume this is the cheap option. It is the most expensive one on this page. These are the prices in the official CTT 2026 price list for a private individual:

A year of CTT forwarding to an address abroad costs 353,37 € (the full breakdown, in Portuguese, is in our guia da reexpedição dos CTT), and the envelopes still arrive closed, late, and only as paper. A year of a virtual mailbox costs 119,88 € and the contents reach your email within 2 business days. The comparison is not close, and almost nobody knows it, because the price lives on page 15 of a PDF.

It is the right tool for one job: you moved, and you want the physical paper to follow you. It is the wrong tool if you need to know what a letter says quickly, because nothing is opened or scanned. An IMI notice posted in Lisbon reaches a letterbox in Toronto weeks later, and the deadline printed inside started running when it was sent. It also needs a Portuguese address to forward from, which is exactly the thing you no longer have.

Option 3: an apartado (post office box)

An apartado is a numbered box at a CTT branch. Mail accumulates there safely and the address is stable, which is genuinely useful. The catch is that somebody still has to walk into that branch, unlock the box, open the envelopes and tell you what is inside. From another country that is not a solution, it is the same problem with a nicer address. Some institutions also refuse a box number where a street address is required.

Option 4: a virtual mailbox

A virtual mailbox is a real Portuguese street address, in a real building, staffed by people whose job is your post. Letters arrive, are opened under the written mandate you sign when you subscribe, are scanned, and the scan reaches your email. Registered letters are signed for on your behalf under that same mandate. You read the contents on the day they arrive, from wherever you live.

At Portugal Mailbox that costs 9,99 € per month with VAT included, covering reception and scanning of up to 5 letters, with no per-page fees. Extra letters are 2,50 € each. Scans are emailed within 2 business days of arrival. Originals are kept for 60 days and then destroyed confidentially, or forwarded anywhere in the world for 10 € plus CTT postage.

What still writes to you on paper

• Banks: cards and PIN envelopes, contract changes, arrears notices. Cards in particular are almost never handed over digitally.
• Finanças: access codes, IRS assessments, IMI notices and enforcement warnings. Detail in our guide to Finanças letters from abroad.
• AIMA: residence permit notifications, appointment letters and payment requests, sent by registered mail and counted as delivered once sent. See the guide to AIMA notifications.
• Segurança Social, insurers, utilities, condominiums, courts: statements, renewals, meeting minutes, citations.

What a correspondence address cannot be

It cannot be a company registered office (sede social) and it cannot be a tax domicile or morada fiscal. Those carry separate legal duties and belong to accountants and fiscal representation services, not to a mailbox. We handle letters only, not parcels. And your mail is opened only because you signed a mandate authorising it and verified your identity first: without that, opening another person's mail is a crime in Portugal, which is exactly why the mandate and the ID check exist rather than being paperwork we could skip.

Related: setting up your mail before you move to Portugal and receiving a Portuguese bank card and PIN from abroad. See also our virtual mailbox in Portugal, the option described in the last row. This page is informative and is not tax or legal advice.