Only two Portuguese regions issued more building permits this spring
Councils licensed 6,162 buildings between April and June, down 7.1% in a year. Greater Lisbon fell 35.1% and the Algarve 24.9%, while new-build dwellings licensed rose 10.8% to 11,834.
Portuguese councils granted permits to 6,162 buildings between April and June. That is 7.1% fewer than in the same quarter of 2025 — and, oddly enough, an improvement on the start of the year, when the drop was running at 9.7%.
Buried further down the release is the number that matters if you are house-hunting. Dwellings licensed in new builds for family housing rose 10.8%, to 11,834. Fewer buildings, then, but more homes inside each one. Apartment blocks rather than houses, in short.
Two regions up, everywhere else down
The regional map is unusually lopsided. Madeira rose 25.2% and the North managed a barely-there 0.2%. Every other region fell, and the steepest falls landed exactly where demand is tightest: Greater Lisbon down 35.1%, the Algarve down 24.9%, the Setúbal Peninsula down 20.3%.
The Alentejo is a puzzle until you read the footnote. It licensed 295 buildings, 8.1% fewer than a year earlier, yet the total floor area licensed jumped 259.9% — from 129,047 to 464,477 square metres. Statistics Portugal credits that almost entirely to manufacturing floor space licensed in Sines, the same municipality that has been distorting Alentejo figures all year.
Completions tell the opposite story
Look at finished work and the sign flips. Some 3,878 buildings were completed, down 4.2%, but 7,437 new dwellings for family housing were finished, up 11.6% year on year. That is construction begun two or three years ago arriving now. It says nothing about what is being started today.
The North and Centre accounted for 57.9% of completed buildings and 60.2% of new dwellings. If you expected the building effort to concentrate where rents hurt most, the arithmetic does not cooperate.
None of this helps anyone looking for a flat this month, but it does frame what reaches the market next. Read it alongside Portugal’s new building permit rules, which slipped from August to October — some of this slowdown is paperwork waiting for a regime that has not arrived.
The full tables sit in Statistics Portugal’s Construction and Housing section.
Chart: Tugadaily, with data from INE
