Cards and Payments in Portugal: Multibanco, MB WAY and What Your Card Cannot Do

Portugal is a card-heavy country with its own domestic payment network, and that network shapes daily life more than any individual card choice. The most useful thing a newcomer can learn is not which card has the best rewards — it is why a perfectly functional foreign card can occasionally be refused at a Portuguese terminal.

The co-badging rule, and the refused-card problem

Portuguese cards are typically co-badged: they carry more than one payment brand. Banco de Portugal's consumer portal sets out how this works, and it explains an experience many newcomers have.

Debit-side brands include Multibanco, Visa Electron and Maestro. Credit-side brands include Visa, Mastercard and American Express. On a dual-function card you may choose the debit brand to have the amount taken immediately, or the credit brand to draw on a credit limit.

The rule that matters is this, in Banco de Portugal's own words: when the point-of-sale terminal accepts only one payment brand, cardholders cannot choose the brand through which they pay — they must use the brand available on both the card and the terminal. Where the terminal accepts more than one of the card's brands, it displays them and you choose.

Follow that through. A foreign card carrying Visa and Mastercard, presented at a terminal offering only Multibanco, has no brand in common with the terminal. The payment cannot route. This is not a block on foreign cards or a fault in yours; it is an overlap problem, and it is the actual explanation behind most "my card was refused in Portugal" stories.

It has become less common as Portuguese terminals increasingly accept international schemes, but it persists — particularly with smaller merchants and some automated machines. The practical defence is to carry a backup means of payment and not to assume universal acceptance because your card works elsewhere in Europe.

One related quirk from the same source: in Portugal, some credit cards allow debit transactions at ATMs — cash withdrawals, service payments and transfers — but those cards cannot be used at a point of sale to debit the current account directly.

Multibanco is not an ATM network

Calling Multibanco an ATM network undersells it considerably. Operated by SIBS and running since 1985, it supports more than 60 operations, available 24 hours a day in five languages. Alongside cash withdrawals — between €10 and €200 per transaction — the machines handle balance enquiries, recent transaction viewing, and payment of invoices from thousands of suppliers through Multibanco references. Banco de Portugal confirms the debit functions available at Portuguese ATMs as cash withdrawals, payment of services and credit transfers.

That middle function is the one to internalise. A great deal of Portuguese billing works by issuing you a reference — a set of numbers you enter at an ATM or in your banking app to pay a specific bill. It is a genuinely convenient system once understood, and mystifying if you are expecting a card-and-checkout model.

The network's scale, from SIBS's audited annual report for 2024:

Note the divergence in that table: point-of-sale transactions rose 19% while ATM transactions fell 5%, and SIBS reports its ATM estate growing at an average of only 2% a year over three years. Portugal is shifting from cash-at-machine toward card-at-terminal, and the infrastructure numbers show it.

(SIBS's terminal and ATM counts are group-wide figures covering more than 25 countries rather than Portugal alone, so we have not quoted a Portugal-specific machine count here — the published figures use different scopes and we could not reconcile them to a single reliable number.)

MB WAY

MB WAY is the mobile layer, created by SIBS in 2015 and described in its annual report as the first instant mobile payment solution in the euro area. It lives inside participating banks' apps rather than as a separate wallet.

What it does: QR-code and contactless payments, cardless ATM withdrawals, virtual card numbers for online use, subscription management, bill splitting, money requests, public transport payments and digital receipts.

Adoption, from SIBS: over 6.5 million users at its tenth anniversary in October 2025, having closed 2024 at 6.2 million users — up 13% year on year — with MB WAY operations growing 39% during 2024 and a single day exceeding 5 million transactions. Against a resident population of roughly 11.4 million, that is deep penetration.

Two developments worth knowing. MB WAY and Multibanco transfers migrated to the SEPA Instant model during 2024. And SIBS leads the EuroPA consortium with Spain's Bizum and Italy's Bancomat to make these domestic systems interoperable across borders — relevant if you move between southern European countries.

Cards in issue, and the cash question

Banco de Portugal's own statistics portal — which, unlike its institutional site, is openly accessible — puts active payment cards in Portugal at 26.74 million in 2025, of which 25.25 million carry a debit function and 9.84 million a credit function. Those sum to more than the total because co-badged cards carry both.

The trend is worth noting: the total dipped slightly from 27.53 million in 2024, while the longer arc is up from 23.31 million in 2021.

(Banco de Portugal's annual payments report cites a higher card total on a different definitional scope. We have used the statistics-portal series because we could verify it directly at source, and the two are not interchangeable — do not mix a figure from one with a figure from the other.)

On cash, the European Central Bank's 2024 SPACE study records Portugal among the largest falls in the cash share of point-of-sale payments between 2022 and 2024, at 10 percentage points — alongside Germany and Malta. Across the euro area, cash fell from 59% to 52% of point-of-sale payments by number over the same period, with cards at 39%.

Two Portugal-specific findings from the same study are practical rather than academic. 47% of Portuguese respondents said they had cancelled a transaction rather than pay an ATM fee — the highest figure reported among the countries highlighted, and higher than Spain's 36% — though consumers in both countries pay ATM fees less often than the euro-area average. And 34% said they make a special journey to obtain cash. Portugal also uses e-payment solutions more than average online, at 33% of online payment methods against a 29% euro-area average, which is MB WAY showing up in the statistics.

The rate cap: a real number, and a correction

Portugal caps what consumer credit may cost, and unlike most such regimes the number is published and current. Banco de Portugal calculates the maxima every quarter, by credit category, under Decreto-Lei 133/2009.

For the third quarter of 2026 — July to September — the maximum APR is:

Those figures were published on 3 June 2026 and apply to contracts concluded in that quarter.

Now the correction, because a great deal of secondary content gets this wrong. The cap is the average APR charged in the previous quarter for that category plus one quarter — not plus one third. The one-third multiplier applied only until 30 June 2013. There is also an overall ceiling: no rate may exceed the average APR across all consumer credit agreements of the previous quarter by more than 50%.

Two consequences matter when comparing offers.

First, this caps the APR, not the nominal rate. The APR (TAEG) captures interest plus fees plus mandatory insurance and every other charge; the nominal rate (TAN) captures interest alone. A card advertising a TAN comfortably below 18.5% tells you nothing about whether it complies. Portuguese lenders must disclose the TAN, the TAEG and the total amount payable by the consumer (MTIC) — compare on the middle one.

Second, do not reverse-engineer the market average from the cap. The published maximum is the lower of the plus-one-quarter figure and the overall 50% ceiling, and which of the two binds is not published.

For what the market actually charges, the European Central Bank's series for Portugal put revolving loans, overdrafts and credit card debt at 11.82% in May 2026, against a euro-area equivalent of 7.66%. Portuguese revolving credit therefore runs roughly four percentage points above the euro-area average — comfortably inside the cap, but not cheap. These are ECB new-business statistics on a different scope from Banco de Portugal's cap aggregates; the two are not the same measurement and should not be mixed.

The tax nobody mentions

Portuguese stamp duty — imposto do selo — applies to consumer credit and is easy to miss when comparing costs:

• 4% on the amount of interest and commissions charged, plus
• 0.141% per month on the credit used, for terms under one year, or
• 1.76% on the credit used, for longer terms

That sits on top of the interest rate, and is another reason the TAEG rather than the TAN is the number that matters. One protection on the other side: institutions may not charge commissions for processing credit instalments, or any other commission applied for the same purpose.

Who actually lives here

Portugal's foreign population has transformed in five years, and the composition is not what most English-language content assumes.

At 31 December 2025, Statistics Portugal put the foreign-national resident population at 1,597,539 — 14.0% of a total 11,424,031 residents. The five-year change is dramatic: up 849,384 people since 2021, more than doubling, and adding 6.9 percentage points of population share.

But the surge has sharply decelerated. Annual growth fell from +326,090 in 2022 to +59,113 in 2025. Anyone writing about Portugal as a country in the middle of an immigration boom is describing 2022, not now.

The composition:

Brazilians are more than a third of all foreign residents — over fourteen times the British population, which sits eleventh. If you have arrived from Brazil, our guide to Brazilian cards covers the market you left, and the contrast is stark: you are moving from roughly 440% annual revolving rates to a capped-rate regime inside the euro.

Geographically, Greater Lisbon holds 34.2% of foreign residents and the North 19.5%; the Algarve has the highest share of its own regional population at 27.9%.

One warning if you research this yourself. Portugal has two official series that disagree — Statistics Portugal's validated statistics and AIMA's administrative registry, which counts everyone holding a valid residence document including in-progress regularisations. For the UK the registry figure is about 25% higher despite being a year earlier. They are complementary rather than competing, but never mix them, and always name the source and reference date.

Getting set up, and the currency question

Portugal is in the euro, so if you arrive from another euro country your currency problem disappears entirely. If your income is in pounds, dollars or reais, it does not.

A Wise multi-currency account holds and converts at a disclosed mark-up, which suits income arriving in one currency against euro costs — a common position for the large Brazilian and British populations above. For business income across countries, Airwallex covers the same ground. Our multi-currency account versus travel credit card comparison sets out where each fits.

The Portugal-specific limitation is sharper than elsewhere in this series, and it follows directly from the first section of this article. A foreign-issued account gives you a card carrying international brands — not the Multibanco brand. So it does not solve the co-badging problem, it will not give you MB WAY, and it will not connect you to the Multibanco reference system that a good deal of Portuguese billing runs on. It solves conversion. It does not substitute for a Portuguese account, and in Portugal that distinction bites harder than in most countries.

You also retain the EU-wide fallback: a basic payment account is an entitlement for anyone legally resident in the Union, covered in your legal right to a bank account in the EU.

The Bottom Line

Understand Multibanco before you understand cards. It is the backbone of Portuguese payments, it does far more than dispense cash, and the co-badging rule explains the one genuinely confusing experience newcomers have — a foreign card that cannot route at a Multibanco-only terminal because it shares no brand with it. Carry a backup.

Get a Portuguese account for MB WAY and for reference-based billing, not because a foreign card fails everywhere, but because the domestic system is where the convenience lives.

On cost, compare TAEG rather than TAN — the cap is an APR cap, so a flattering nominal rate proves nothing. The current ceiling for cards and credit lines is 18.5% for July to September 2026, revised quarterly, and the market average sits around 11.8%, roughly four points above the euro area. Remember stamp duty on top: 4% of interest and commissions, plus a charge on the credit used.

This is information, not financial advice. Maximum rates are revised periodically, stamp duty and tax rules change, and payment statistics are published on annual cycles. Confirm current figures with Banco de Portugal and current terms with the institution before acting.