Madeira tourist tax in plain English (2026)
How the municipal tourist tax (Ecotaxa) works in Madeira and Porto Santo, who pays it, how to declare it, and the 2.5% commission you can claim back.
If you run an Alojamento Local in Madeira, the municipal tourist tax is probably the single most confusing piece of bureaucracy you'll meet — partly because every municipality runs its own system, and partly because the rules changed multiple times between 2023 and 2026.
Here's the honest, plain-English version of how it actually works in 2026.
Who has to charge it
Almost every municipality on Madeira island charges a tourist tax. Porto Moniz is the only one that doesn't.
The other ten — Funchal, Santa Cruz, Câmara de Lobos, Machico, Calheta, Ponta do Sol, São Vicente, Santana, Ribeira Brava, Porto Santo — all require AL operators to collect a tax from guests and pay it forward to the local câmara.
How much, per guest, per night
Most Madeira municipalities currently charge €2 per person, per night, up to a maximum of 7 nights. So a couple staying 5 nights pays €20. A couple staying 10 nights pays €28 (the cap is per stay, not per month).
Exemptions you must apply automatically:
- Children 12 and under pay nothing.
- Residents of Madeira (with a fiscal address on the island) pay nothing.
- Some municipalities also exempt long stays over a certain length.
Chave AL handles these automatically based on the data each guest enters at check-in.
How you declare it
This is where it gets fragmented. There is no single national portal. Each municipality runs its own:
- Santa Cruz, Funchal, Machico, Porto Santo use a system called Sigma wsCidadão — the operator logs in monthly, uploads a summary table, generates a payment reference, and pays via Multibanco or transfer.
- Smaller municipalities still use email or paper forms in some cases.
Every month, by the 20th, you submit a declaration of guests who stayed in that municipality during the previous month.
The 2.5% commission almost nobody knows about
Here's the thing most accountants miss: Santa Cruz and Albufeira (and some others) give the operator a 2.5% commission for collecting the tax on their behalf.
If you collected €88 of tax in March, the câmara will refund you €2.20 — but only if you upload an invoice for that commission amount, addressed to the câmara, including VAT at 22%.
On a busy summer season this adds up to real money, and most operators leave it on the table because the portal makes it look optional.
Chave AL generates the commission invoice for you, in the right format, every time you create a monthly declaration.
Cross-month stays
A guest staying 28 June – 5 July does not all go in one declaration. Three nights belong to June (28, 29 and 30), four nights belong to July (1–4), and the tax is split accordingly: €6 (June) + €8 (July) = €14.
If you've been declaring full stays under whichever month they checked out, you've been over-paying one câmara and under-paying another. Chave AL splits the nights automatically.
What you owe vs. what your guest paid
An important distinction: the tax is collected from the guest, not paid by the host. The câmara doesn't care whether the guest actually handed you €2 a night — it cares that you hand it over.
So if Booking.com or Airbnb didn't pass the city tax to you on a particular booking, you still owe it. Chave AL flags this in the monthly declaration so you can either chase the OTA or absorb the cost knowingly.
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If you want to see how it looks in practice for your municipality, log in to Chave AL, open Tourist Tax → Monthly Declaration, and pick the month. The system shows you exactly what to upload, in the right format, for the right câmara.
Read more in the Setup Guide or browse other blog posts.
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