A período de carência — a waiting period — is a stretch at the start of a Portuguese health policy during which a specific type of care is not yet covered. The length is not uniform across the policy: it varies by what is being claimed, and knowing the shape of that variation matters more than any single headline figure.
Why waiting periods exist at all
A waiting period protects a health insurer against someone joining specifically because they already know they need a particular treatment — anti-selection. Without it, insurance for a known, imminent cost would not function as insurance. The length an insurer sets for each category of care roughly tracks how easy that category would be to anti-select against: routine care is hard to time strategically, so its waiting period is short; a planned surgery or a pregnancy is easy to time, so those periods run longer.
The general shape
| Type of care | Typical shape of the waiting period |
|---|---|
| Routine consultations | Shortest, sometimes waived entirely on some products. |
| Diagnostics and outpatient tests | Short to moderate. |
| Hospitalisation and surgery | Moderate to long, and often longer again for a procedure that could plausibly be planned in advance. |
| Maternity | Longest on most policies — commonly measured in months rather than weeks, precisely because a pregnancy is the easiest event to anti-select against. |
| Pre-existing conditions, membership-based route | 365 days on MGEN's structure specifically — a different mechanism from the categories above, applied because no medical questionnaire is used at entry. |
Indicative shape, not quoted figures for any specific product — exact waiting periods are set by each insurer and vary by policy tier; confirm the actual numbers for a specific product before relying on them.
Emergency care is usually the exception
Genuine emergencies are commonly excluded from waiting periods altogether on Portuguese health policies — the waiting period restricts planned and routine care, not a genuine emergency admission. Confirm this specifically for your policy rather than assuming it, since "emergency" itself is a defined term in the wording, not a judgment call made after the fact.
Continuity from a previous policy
Coming from continuous prior cover — another Portuguese policy, or in some cases a foreign one with the right evidence — can sometimes be credited against a new policy's waiting periods, reducing or removing them. This is insurer-specific and depends on documentary proof of the prior, uninterrupted cover, so ask about it explicitly and get the answer in writing before assuming continuity will be recognised.
What this means when comparing policies
Two policies at the same premium can carry materially different waiting periods, and the shorter one is not automatically the better product once the rest of the cover is weighed — see acceptance, not price for why premium alone is the wrong first comparison. Ask for the waiting-period schedule in writing for each category of care you actually expect to use, not just the headline figure for the product as a whole.
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Adler & Rochefort is a commercial brand of Ownizo, Unipessoal Lda., registered with the Portuguese Insurance and Pension Funds Supervisory Authority (ASF) under no. 425591790/3. General information only, not personalised advice; waiting periods are set individually by each insurer and product and should be confirmed in writing before a policy is relied upon.
More on this subject: MGEN: membership-based cover without a questionnaire · Acceptance, not price: four routes compared · Pre-existing conditions explained