Portugal Freezes Prices of Medicines Under €30 Until 2026

The government’s medicine-pricing watchdog has drawn a new line in the sand and it sits firmly at €30. In practice, that means the price you pay at the counter for hundreds of common pills and syrups will remain exactly what it is today throughout 2026, even if inflation quickens or the euro wobbles.

A shield for everyday treatments

Pharmacists across the country say the measure zeroes in on the drugs most likely to disappear from shelves when margins get razor-thin. Think of the ubiquitous paracetamol tablet, the metformin pill that keeps type-2 diabetes under control, or the injectable azithromycin kept in hospital refrigerators. By exempting these and every other product with a public price tag under €30 from the Annual Price Review, Infarmed hopes to curb the supply hiccups that have plagued low-cost generics. The authority’s president, Rui Ivo, calls it a “protective buffer” that should keep manufacturers interested in the Portuguese market without forcing the state to open its wallet wider.

How the rule book changes

Next year’s pricing order lifts the freeze threshold from €16 to €30, a leap that immediately widens the circle of protected medicines. Anything above that ceiling will still be benchmarked against the average charged in Spain, France, Italy and Belgium. If Portugal turns out to be the outlier on the expensive side, Infarmed can demand reductions of up to 20 %. Inside hospitals the limits differ: products under €75 stay untouched, while costlier therapies face a comparison with the single cheapest price in the same quartet of reference countries, with no cap on downward revision.

Pharmacies weigh benefits and risks

The Associação Nacional de Farmácias has long argued that rock-bottom prices are precisely what pushes wholesalers to ignore Portugal when global demand spikes. Its president, Ema Paulino, even suggested modest increases for the very cheapest molecules just weeks before the freeze was announced. For now, the association is studying the decree but privately some owners concede that a predictable retail price can still beat the catastrophe of empty drawers. The bigger concern is cash-flow: pharmacies earn a fixed margin on each box sold, so a frozen tariff means margins shrink if operating costs climb.

Counting the euros for the public purse

Infarmed’s economists calculate a saving near €50 M for the state, money that the Health Ministry says will be channelled toward novel treatments for cancer and rare diseases. The figure may look small against a National Health Service budget that pushed past €15 B in 2025, yet insiders note that pharmaceutical spending is one of the few lines that has stayed flat at about 14 % of total expenditure over the past decade. A recent study by ISEG for the employers’ confederation underlined that stability and credited industry clawbacks for holding the line.

Europe moves in the same direction – but not identically

Price restraint is hardly a Portuguese eccentricity. Germany has extended a freeze first imposed in 2009, France is pushing a multi-billion euro cut, and Spain is reviewing the tags on 17 000 medicines. That said, analysts caution that the continent’s patchwork of caps and clawbacks can backfire; manufacturers often prioritise larger, better-paying markets when shortages loom. Brussels is trying to craft a critical-medicines act to iron out those distortions, yet progress is glacial.

What to watch in 2026

Patients will notice the effect of the freeze only if they don’t notice anything at all – no surprise price hikes and, ideally, no out-of-stock notices. Pharmacists will watch wholesale catalogues like hawks to ensure suppliers honour their contracts, while the Health Ministry will check whether the €50 M windfall truly materialises. For the pharmaceutical industry, the bigger question is whether Portugal’s pricing model, once seen as a regional outlier, is quietly becoming the new Southern European norm.