The PortugalBIM strategy

Council of Ministers Resolution 89/2026 organises the sector's transition around four pillars and assigns delivery to IMPIC.

The National Strategy for the Implementation of the BIM Methodology was approved by Council of Ministers Resolution 89/2026 and published on 21 May. It is called PortugalBIM and is the document preparing the construction sector’s move to working in an information model.

1 January 2030

This is the date from which architectural designs covered by the legal regime for urbanisation and building must be modelled using the BIM methodology. The obligation comes from Decree-Law 10/2024 and was developed in the PortugalBIM strategy, organised around four pillars: policy, standardisation, technologies and training.

The scope is set in article 17 of the Simplex Urbanístico: it covers architectural designs submitted to a municipal council. The obligation is not limited to public works.

The PortugalBIM national strategy

Delivery falls to IMPIC, working with the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering, the Portuguese Institute for Quality and the Agency for State Technological Reform. The resolution provides for an action plan with multiannual investment, tasks, deadlines and annual targets, to be presented within ninety days of publication. IMPIC then reports to the government every six months.

The targets come with numbers: training for at least three thousand professionals in the public and private sectors, BIM taken up in at least fifty municipalities a year and access to software for at least fifty organisations a year. The strategy also provides for an online platform with content, tools and an interoperability reference framework, and a repository of BIM models from public works.

The resolution names what holds adoption back, and the list will be familiar to anyone working in the sector: the cost of software licences, the computing equipment in place, training that does not reach every professional and the complexity of standards language.

Relationship with European references

March 2026 brought EN 18162 on digital twins in the built environment, as work progressed on the revision of the first parts of EN ISO 19650, dedicated to information management throughout an asset’s life cycle. In May, the EU BIM Task Group published a new handbook for public clients, linking BIM to environmental assessment and digital instruments such as product passports and digital building logbooks.

The practical consequence of these measures is more demanding than the word BIM suggests: a design is not a set of drawings with a model attached; it is structured information that will be checked against written requirements.

At the practice, BIM already underpins project work and coordination between disciplines.