Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to managing tabbing order in a portal environment and provide a novel and non-obvious method, system and computer program product for tab order management for portlets in a portal environment. In a first embodiment, a tab order management data processing system can include a portal server configured to render a portal page, a portlet aggregator configured to provide portlet markup for different portlets in the portal page, and tab order management logic coupled to the portlet aggregator. The tab order management logic can be configured to transform a relative tab order for tabbed elements in each of the different portlets into a single tab order for the portal page. For instance, the tab order management logic can include a configuration to transform relative indices for the tabbed elements in each of the different portlets into a single index for the portal page.