1,997 of Portugal's 6,639 leftover university places are in engineering
The second-round total everyone quoted is not the final one. DGES publishes today the first-round seats nobody enrolled in, and applications stay open until 20 September.
Apply / Learn moreEveryone printed the same figure: 6,639 places going into the second round. It is accurate and it is incomplete. The DGES note itself says the September round also takes in the seats that were awarded in August but never enrolled against, and that those numbers are only published today, 1 September, on the agency’s website.
Which means anyone weighing up whether to apply spent last week looking at a total that is about to grow. Once today’s list is out, there are two things you can do before 20 September. If you have already applied, you can change your application. If you have not, you can still submit one.
Where are Portugal’s 6,639 leftover university places?
The 6,639 are not spread evenly, and that matters more than the headline total. Working through the DGES tables ourselves: 1,997 of them, close to a third, sit in engineering and allied technical fields. Add the five fields in the chart and you reach 4,091 places, more than 60 per cent of everything left.
There is a second reading, in the table by subsystem. Of the leftover places, 5,017 are at polytechnics and 1,622 at universities. That is three in every four. A student who missed out in August and is still writing public universities at the top of the list is competing for the smallest quarter of the pie.
Why so little was left
The first round filled almost everything. It placed 49,991 students, the highest number since 2020, from a valid field of 60,513 applicants, with 82.6 per cent of those applicants getting a seat. The 56,228 places put up for competition were the most in the ten years DGES publishes in its historical table. In 2025, 11,513 places rolled into the second round; this year 6,639 did, a fall of 42.3 per cent.
That also explains the drop in applications reported last week. In the first seven days of the second round, 10,587 candidates registered, down 17.9 per cent year on year, which by subtraction puts the 2025 figure at 12,889 for the same window. It is not a loss of appetite. It is that fewer people were left outside. Even so, and before today’s list joins the pool, that is roughly 1.6 applicants per place.
Second-round results land on 30 September. Anyone placed in August may apply again, with a consequence worth reading twice: if you are placed now, the August placement and the enrolment you completed are both cancelled. Worth revisiting the first-round arithmetic and the enrolment calendar before touching something already secured.
Chart: Tugadaily, with DGES data
