SIFIDE — Tax Incentives for Business R&D
A tax credit that turns your R&D spending — including digital and environmental transition projects — into a direct deduction from your corporate tax bill.
What is SIFIDE?
SIFIDE (Sistema de Incentivos Fiscais à Investigação e Desenvolvimento Empresarial) is a tax incentive under Portugal's Investment Tax Code that rewards companies for investing in Research & Development. Eligible R&D expenditure — including projects tied to digital and environmental transition — can be deducted directly from the IRC due for the tax period, in addition to the expense's normal deductibility as a cost.
Eligible R&D Activities
Basic research — acquiring new scientific or technical knowledge, without a direct commercial application in view
Applied research — research directed at a specific practical objective or aim
Experimental development — turning research findings into new or improved products, processes or services
Feasibility studies — technical and economic studies that support the design of an R&D project
What expenses are eligible?
Personnel
Staff directly engaged in R&D activities, meeting minimum qualification and dedication thresholds.
Operating expenses
Materials, consumables and other R&D operating costs directly linked to the project.
Contracted R&D
R&D commissioned from public entities, higher education institutions or officially recognised organisations.
IP & other costs
Registration and maintenance of patents arising from R&D, participation in the capital of R&D institutions, and feasibility studies.
Note: Eligible R&D expenditure remains deductible as a normal cost, on top of the SIFIDE tax credit.
What is the tax credit?
| Component | Rate |
|---|---|
| Base rate | 32.5% of eligible R&D expenditure in the tax period |
| Incremental rate | 50% of the increase over the average of the previous two tax periods, capped at €1.5M |
| New SMEs (no two-year history) | Base rate applied to the entire eligible expenditure, no incremental calculation required |
Rates, caps and carryforward periods are set annually by the State Budget Law — current figures are indicative; confirm the applicable tax year with Elyntis.
What Elyntis delivers under this regime
Most software work is not R&D — and ANI knows the difference. What qualifies is work with genuine technical uncertainty, run as an experiment and recorded as one. We do the engineering, and we generate the evidence that shows it was research rather than routine development.
Framing the R&D question
Separating the genuinely uncertain part of your roadmap from the routine build, so the project reads as experimental development.
Prototypes & proofs of concept
Working prototypes built to test a hypothesis — including the ones that fail, which are still eligible R&D.
AI & data experimentation
Model development, evaluation harnesses and measured comparisons against a documented baseline.
Test platforms & data pipelines
The infrastructure your experiments run on: datasets, pipelines, instrumentation and reproducible test environments.
Technical evidence for the dossier
Experiment logs, versioned records, results and dead ends — written as your R&D team works, not reconstructed a year later.
Working alongside your team
Elyntis engineers embedded with your own R&D staff, whose dedicated time is itself the largest eligible cost line.
One caveat worth stating plainly: R&D contracted out to a third party is only eligible when that supplier holds ANI-recognised status. We will tell you at scoping which parts of our work can be claimed as contracted R&D and which are better structured around your own team — before you commit to anything.
Turn R&D expenditure into a tax advantage.
Count on Elyntis to assess, document and certify your SIFIDE claim.
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