New Lisbon Airport (Luís de Camões) Tracker: Timeline, Costs and Fees

Where the project stands in October 2026

The Luís de Camões airport is being procured under ANA's 2012 concession contract, without a public tender. Clauses 45 and 46 give ANA the right and the obligation to submit a full application, the candidatura, within 36 months of a formal notice. The government sent that notice on 16 January 2025, eight months after the Council of Ministers chose the Campo de Tiro de Alcochete (CTA) on 14 May 2024 in Resolution 66/2024. The clock runs to January 2028.

ANA has met every deadline so far. It delivered an initial report on 17 December 2024, a stakeholder consultation report on 17 July 2025, an accessibility report on 9 December 2025, a site and environmental report on 16 January 2026 and a technical report in mid-July 2026, presented publicly on 22 July. It filed an environmental impact study of about 5,000 pages with the Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente (APA) on 31 July 2026. The financial report, the document that says who pays and how, is due in January 2027.

Each government reply has carried the same reservation: the response "não constitui aceitação formal da candidatura". The latest, on 26 September 2026, asked ANA to justify one terminal instead of two, to make the runways compatible with Code F aircraft such as the A380, to supply demand scenarios and to bring the calendar forward. Technical negotiations on contract amendments opened on 22 December 2025 under Despacho 15178/2025, without a formal negotiating committee. No amended contract has been published.

Fifty-seven years of choosing

The search for a second Lisbon airport is older than the 1974 revolution. A 1969 decree created a Gabinete do Novo Aeroporto de Lisboa. Ota, north of the city, was the official site from the late 1990s until January 2008, when a comparative study by the national civil engineering laboratory LNEC favoured Alcochete and the government switched (Resolutions 13/2008 and 85/2008). APA issued a favourable environmental declaration for the Alcochete site on 9 December 2010.

The financial crisis froze the project, and the privatisation of ANA in December 2012 tied it to the concession. In January 2019 the government and ANA agreed a cheaper dual model: keep Humberto Delgado and add a civil terminal at the Montijo air base, for €1.15 billion plus €156 million of compensation and access works. It died on 2 March 2021, when the civil aviation authority ANAC rejected the application because Moita and Seixal had given negative opinions, which a 2007 decree-law made binding. The government created an independent technical commission, the CTI, under Resolution 89/2022. Its final report of 11 March 2024 ranked a single airport at Alcochete, or alternatively Vendas Novas, as most favourable, with a first runway in 2030 and a second in 2031.

Two months later the government chose Alcochete and named the airport after the poet Luís de Camões, in the 500th anniversary year of his birth. Measured from the 1969 office to ANA's opening date, the project spans about 68 years. Measured from the 2024 decision, ANA's schedule takes 13. Berlin Brandenburg, Europe's benchmark for delay, opened in October 2020, nine years after its planned date.

The opening date has three answers

ANA's technical report schedules construction from mid-2030 to the end of 2036, operational readiness trials after that, and opening in mid-2037, or late 2036 if approvals come faster. The government's own summary of the same report, published on 22 July 2026, shows construction from 2029 to 2033, certification to 2035 and opening "a partir de 2035". Infrastructure minister Miguel Pinto Luz has gone further. He named 2034 on the day of the decision in May 2024 and on 28 September 2026 asked ANA for a joint effort to land the first aircraft that year.

The CTI's 2030 date did not survive the decision itself: on 14 May 2024 the minister said 2030 and 2031 were not possible and 2034 would be reasonable. ANA's chairman José Luís Arnaut answered the latest push by pointing back at the State: shorter timelines, he said, depend on the government taking less than a year to decide on the financial report. The government's 26 September communiqué names no year. We treat mid-2037 as the only date with a published schedule behind it, 2035 as the government's planning date and 2034 as a ministerial aim.

Several dependencies sit outside ANA's control. The Air Force firing range on the site must be demilitarised by 31 December 2029 under Resolution 119/2026, with a budget of €4.5 million plus VAT, and the range moves to Alter do Chão. The rail link depends on the third Tagus crossing between Chelas and Barreiro, which the minister says needs four to five years of works and must be ready with the airport because of a commitment to Spain on high-speed rail by 2034. APA has not published consultation dates for the environmental study.

Eleven claims that fail a check

Four years of reports, leaks and ministerial statements have left figures in circulation that no longer match the record. These are the ones we found repeated in English-language coverage, plus one from our own planning document.

Our own Lisbon tourism statistics analysis, published in October, states the cost, the 2092 extension and the mid-2037 date correctly. It says the government wants the airport "about three years sooner"; that is the minister's 2034 aim, while the government's planning date of 2035 is about two years sooner.

Why Humberto Delgado cannot wait

The current airport's problem is hourly. ANAC's president said in January 2026 that use of declared capacity rose from 65% in 2015 to 93% in 2023. Declared capacity is 38 movements an hour. For summer 2026, NAV Portugal's chairman said airlines requested 164,000 slots and 147,000 were allocated, with about 20,000 requests waitlisted. RTP reported that as 12% unmet. The two counts give 10.4% (derived), and the difference is unexplained.

The traffic series shows what a cap does. Eurostat counts 31.19 million passengers on 216,604 commercial passenger flights in 2019 and 36.08 million on 223,586 flights in 2025. Passengers per flight rose from 144 to 161. In the first half of 2026 Lisbon grew 1.3% to 17.4 million while Porto grew 7% (INE, via ECO). Lisbon's share of Portugal's air passengers was 49.4% in that half-year.

The interim plan buys a little time. A Mota-Engil consortium won a €233 million contract in November 2024 for ten new contact gates and a 600-metre South Pier. ANA's expansion report of July 2025 phases capacity from 38 to 40, 42 and finally 45 movements an hour around 2034, with traffic of about 40 million by the time the new airport opens. ANA filed the environmental study for the first step, to 40, on 5 June 2026, with works from early 2027; the step to 42 needs a second study. Lisbon's mayor Carlos Moedas declared total opposition to 42 an hour, one aircraft every 81 seconds. The Public Prosecutor challenged the earlier works in the Supreme Administrative Court in January 2025 because they had no environmental assessment. We found no ruling.

Every slot is contested. TAP, whose sale we analyse separately, held 46% of Lisbon's seats in 2024 and about 48% of allocated slots. Whoever buys it buys a share of a fixed pie until the new airport opens. Travellers feel the ceiling as delay: Eurocontrol's 2025 review lists Lisbon among the airports whose departure punctuality fell, by five points, and attributes the delays to weather and aerodrome capacity. ANAC fined operators €8.8 million in 2024 and €3.5 million in 2025 for slot and night-flight breaches, against €270,000 in 2023.

What it will cost

Every cost estimate since the decision has been higher than the one the government announced. The May 2024 presentation, quoting the CTI, put two runways at €6.105 billion: €3.231 billion for the first and €2.874 billion for the second. ANA's initial report of December 2024 said €8.5 billion in 2024 prices, as an indicative figure. The July 2026 technical report gives €7.9–8.9 billion at fourth-quarter 2024 prices. The midpoint, €8.4 billion, is 38% above the CTI figure, and the range runs from 29% to 46% above it (derived).

The range covers the airport inside ANA's perimeter: two runways of 4,000 and 3,700 metres, a terminal of about 500,000 square metres, 64 contact gates and more than 26,000 parking spaces on a 2,250-hectare site, with 92 hectares to expropriate in the first phase. It excludes the third Tagus crossing, the rail link, 250 kilometres of new roads and 50 of upgraded ones, the fuel pipeline, utilities, airspace redesign and demilitarisation. In May 2024 the government put the crossing and the Lisbon–Madrid high-speed link at about €4 billion; ECO reported €3.5 billion for the crossing's rail component in July 2026. No cost has been published for the roads.

The government's line is that the airport will take "nem um cêntimo" from the State budget. That holds for the runways and terminal under ANA's model. It does not hold for the access network, which is the part every traveller will use to reach it. The €4.5 million demilitarisation budget in Resolution 119/2026 is the first public line item tied directly to the site.

For scale: the abandoned Montijo plan was €1.15 billion; Berlin Brandenburg rose from a €2 billion budget to about €7.3 billion; Heathrow's third runway and airfield are costed at £21 billion within a £49 billion plan filed in July 2025. Lisbon's estimate is already above Berlin's final bill, and no construction contract has been signed.

Who pays: the airport-charges fight

ANA's regulated income at Lisbon is capped by a formula, the receita regulada média máxima (RRMM): the maximum average regulated revenue per terminal passenger, counting arrivals and departures. It moves each year by inflation minus an efficiency factor, plus a correction for past forecast errors. The Lisbon cap was €14.49 in 2024 after a 12.45% increase and €14.65 in 2025, and ANAC approved a 0.65% rise for 2026. ANA has filed €14.80 for 2027, a rise of €0.10 that ANAC has yet to decide.

ANA's December 2024 financing proposal would change that path. It asked for real increases each year from 2026 to 2030 to reach €23.32 per passenger in 2024 money, then inflation plus 1% a year to 2039, alongside about €7 billion of corporate debt and a concession extended from 2062 to 2092. From €14.65, that is 9.75% a year above inflation and 59% in total (derived). CNN Portugal, citing ANAC and the competition authority AdC, reported the nominal effect as +74.7% by 2030 and +127.9% by 2039. ANAC's objection was blunt: passengers "iriam pagar por algo que não estão a utilizar".

For a traveller the arithmetic is simple. A round trip through Lisbon counts as two terminal passengers. If the proposed real increase of €8.67 per passenger were passed on in full, a return ticket would carry about €17 more in regulated charges by 2030, in 2024 money (derived). That sits on top of the State's security charge of €3.54 per passenger and the €2 carbon tax in force since July 2021.

The government has refused so far. Pinto Luz told Parliament on 12 February 2025 that the government "não acredita no prazo, no valor e no crescimento das taxas". The airlines' association RENA says Lisbon is already more expensive than Madrid and Barcelona, and ANA's own 20-airport benchmark agrees: Lisbon went from second cheapest in 2019 to seventh most expensive in 2024. Ryanair's Michael O'Leary called the proposal "a fraud". The financial report due in January 2027 is where ANA must restate its case.

The concession behind the plan

The fee dispute is sharper because of the concession's returns. VINCI's winning offer in 2012 was €3.08 billion, a headline that combined an equity price of €1,127.1 million with a separate €1.2 billion upfront concession payment. The Tribunal de Contas audit of December 2023 put the State's net proceeds at €1.108 billion, said the sale did not safeguard the public interest, and counted €5.4 billion of airport charges collected in 2012–2022 that were not treated as public revenue. ANA and the former secretary of state responsible dispute the findings, and a 2016 audit had praised the sale.

ANA's 2025 integrated report shows group revenue of €1,402.1 million, EBITDA of €973.1 million, a 69.4% margin, and net profit of €599.3 million, with debt of €315 million and capital spending of €131 million. Standalone net profit rose from €334 million in 2022 to €510.6 million in 2024. Dividends totalled €1,328 million from 2012 to 2023. In 2024 the State received €245 million in corporate tax and €15 million through the contract's revenue-sharing mechanism. Portugal produced 29% of VINCI Airports' €4,796 million revenue in 2025, second only to the United Kingdom.

ANA's case is that it carries all the construction risk and that charges plus a longer concession are how any private operator finances an €8 billion asset. ANAC and the airlines answer that a company with €315 million of debt and a 69% margin can carry more of the build on its balance sheet, and that today's passengers should not pay for a terminal they will never use. Both positions will be tested against the January 2027 figures.

Will 56 million passengers arrive?

Capacity at opening is 56 million passengers a year, with 85 million at full build-out under the master plan. ANA's Lisbon expansion report expects about 40 million at Humberto Delgado by the time the new airport opens, so the terminal is designed to open with room to spare.

The demand forecasts disagree by a wide margin. The CTI's central scenario put demand at 2.1 to 3.5 times current levels by 2050; ANA called that "marcadamente optimista" in January 2024. In March 2026 the government called ANA's own forecasts "demasiado conservadores" and in September asked for scenarios. ANA's numbers have not been published. Resolution 67/2024 gives the government's 2040 range for the Lisbon system: 37.8–49.2 million passengers in the base case and 42.0–52.1 million in the optimistic case.

Against the actual trend: from 36.1 million in 2025, growth of 2.9% a year reaches 56 million in about 15 years, around 2041 (derived). Filling the terminal by a 2035 opening would need 4.5% a year. Lisbon grew 6.0% a year between 2015 and 2025, pandemic included, so a return to faster growth once slots are freed is plausible. Even so, the top of the government's 2040 range sits below 56 million, so the official planning does not expect the terminal to be full within five years of opening.

The site, the aquifer and the noise at Portela

The site lies on the CTA in Benavente and Montijo municipalities, east of the Tagus estuary and about 40 kilometres from central Lisbon by road. Resolution 30/2026 of 20 February 2026 imposed preventive measures over 71,000 hectares in seven municipalities for two years, with binding ANAC opinions on urban development. Rail access is planned as a 20-minute shuttle from Oriente every 30 minutes, with high-speed trains to Madrid stopping at the airport every two hours.

ANA's environmental study took 18 months and more than 60 specialists. Its critics focus on water. Quercus warned in July 2026 of risk to the Tejo-Sado aquifer, the largest in the Iberian Peninsula, and to Setúbal's water supply, and objected to diverting the Ribeira do Vale Cobrão; it noted that APA had described this site as the most worrying for water resources. The CTI estimated that about 42,000 cork oaks would be affected. ZERO wants the study to compare Vendas Novas and a zero option. Nine NGOs, including SPEA, LPN and ANP|WWF, rejected every Montijo option in January 2024.

Closing Humberto Delgado has its own environmental case for the Lisbon area. ANA's noise action plan for 2024–2029, based on 2023 traffic, counts about 161,000 people exposed to day-evening-night levels of 55 dB or more and at least 72,800 to night levels of 50 dB or more (derived from the plan's bands). Night movements between midnight and 6am are capped at 91 a week; a 1am–5am ban announced in November 2024 had not taken effect by July 2025, when the minister said it "demora tempo". ZERO's monitoring of summer 2025 found 28% of hours above the 38-movement limit. The old airport closes when the new one opens, for airspace reasons, and no land-use plan for the site has been published.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers should plan on Humberto Delgado for at least the next decade. It is about 20 minutes by metro from central Lisbon; the new airport will be about 40 kilometres away, with a promised 20-minute rail shuttle from Oriente. Expect peak-hour delays and few new routes into Lisbon until the 40-movement works finish after 2027. No new-airport charge has been approved, so fares do not yet carry one. If your dates are flexible, Porto and Faro grew faster than Lisbon in 2025 and have more slot room. Our Lisbon travel guide covers getting from the airport into the city.

Tourism businesses and investors should underwrite Lisbon on seat growth of 1–3% a year until the mid-2030s. Opening will add capacity for 56 million passengers against roughly 40 million of demand, a supply shock that favours new entrants and tour operators over incumbents whose value rests on scarce slots. The thresholds that would change this read are ANAC approving any pre-financing charge, an amended concession signed before the April 2029 deadline, APA's environmental declaration, and a construction start for the third Tagus crossing. Land inside the 71,000-hectare preventive zone faces development restrictions until February 2028.

Journalists and analysts can cite: €7.9–8.9 billion at Q4 2024 prices, excluding access (ANA, July 2026); 56 million passengers at opening and 85 million at build-out; ANA's opening date of mid-2037 against the government's 2035; the Lisbon RRMM of €14.65 in 2025; ANA's proposed €23.32 by 2030 in real terms; ANA net profit of €599.3 million in 2025. Do not repeat €6.1 billion or €8.5 billion as the current cost, 2034 as an official date, €3.08 billion as what the State received, or 45 movements an hour by 2028. This article adds to the series' finding, first measured in our Lisbon tourism statistics analysis, that runway capacity is Lisbon's binding constraint, and it adds a new data gap: no public cost exists for the roads, rail and bridge the airport depends on.