The housing crisis in Portugal is worsening as prices rise far more than household wages, in a context of high demand and a lack of residential supply. Since 2019, the price of houses sold in our country has risen by 92%, while average net income has grown by only 43%.
This means that the cost of buying a house has risen more than twice as fast as wage growth.
Between 2019 (the year before the pandemic) and 2025, house prices rose by an average of 91.8% in the last quarter. In the same period, average net (nominal) income grew by 43.3%, according to calculations by Jornal Económico based on data from the National Institute of Statistics.
If we go back another three years, the difference between these two indicators is even more striking. The same newspaper reveals that house prices in Portugal jumped 155.7% between 2016 and 2025, while the average net income in the country rose 53.3%.
Even when comparing this data between 2023 and 2025, the picture does not improve. During this period, wage increases were on average “historically high”, as they were meant to offset income losses caused by war‑related inflation in Ukraine. Even so, the increase in income (20.4%) still failed to keep up with the rise in house prices (32.6%), according to the same source.
Looking at the latest Eurostat data, Portugal recorded the second‑highest rise in house prices in Europe between 2015 and 2025 (+180%). The same newspaper notes that the countries with the largest increases in house prices tend to have some of the lowest wages in the European Union. Portugal is one of these countries, with the minimum wage below the EU average.
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