Tugadaily bar chart of median price per square metre for homes sold in the first quarter of 2026: Greater Lisbon €4,322, Algarve €3,899, Portugal €2,337

Real Estate 8 September 2026

22 million property adverts, 30 countries, one finding: Lisbon is near the bottom

An atlas published in the Journal of Maps by two TU Wien researchers asks how much housing an average local salary buys on a 30-year mortgage. Greater Lisbon lands among the European regions where the answer is under 50 square metres.

This study asks a more useful question than the usual one. Not what a house costs. How many square metres an average local salary buys, if a third of income goes to a thirty-year mortgage.

Run that way, the Lisbon metropolitan area falls into the group of European regions where an average salary does not stretch to 50 square metres. Portugal as a whole shows up among the continent’s hardest places to buy a home on the national wage, alongside the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Where the numbers come from

The work is by Franziska Sielker and Selim Banabak, of the Institute of Spatial Planning at TU Wien, and it was published on 2 September in the Journal of Maps. It rests on more than 22 million property listings gathered by the ESPON HOUSE4ALL project across more than 30 countries between March 2024 and March 2025.

At European scale the picture is bleak in a fairly even way. More than 70% of the population lives in regions where a thirty-year mortgage buys up to 75 square metres. Close to half can only afford the equivalent of a studio or one-bedroom flat. And 39% cannot afford to rent a home that size at all.

The Portuguese map has two halves

Here the dividing line is the coast. Lisbon, Porto, the Algarve and a string of coastal municipalities between Setúbal and Braga sit at the lowest affordability levels. The interior North, the Centre and the Alentejo remain considerably more affordable — which is not good news if the reason is fewer people and fewer jobs.

The authors point to the same combination behind hotspots across Europe: relatively low local wages meeting prices shaped by tourism, second homes and international investment. Coastal and mountain regions, everywhere, come out least affordable.

INE’s figures fill in the rest. In the first quarter of 2026 the median price of homes sold in Greater Lisbon was €4,322 per square metre, against €3,899 in the Algarve and €2,337 nationally. This is why sales are slowing while prices climb, and why councils are counting homes one by one — Porto promised a thousand affordable rentals and will end the year with 588. The European atlas has not told anyone house-hunting in Lisbon something they did not know. What it has done is put them on one map, by one method, and show them how much company they have.

By Duarte Figueiredo

Chart: Tugadaily, with INE data

Tugadaily chart: median house asking price per square metre, June 2026

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House prices in Portugal: the tracker

A running tracker of Portugal's housing market — the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability. Updated with each new data release.

We gather here, in one place, how Portugal's housing market is moving. Instead of one article per data point, we update this page with the essentials: the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability for buyers and renters — which since 1 August also runs through the new mortgage rules, with the debt-service cap down to 45%. Official data is at INE.

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Real Estate 17 September 2026

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Real Estate 9 September 2026

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Bar chart comparing the 1,000-home affordable rent target for 2026, the 588 homes Porto Vivo manages and the new 1,600-home target for 2029

Real Estate 6 September 2026

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Real Estate 4 September 2026

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Bar chart of the monthly payment on a 150,000-euro home loan by Euribor term, compared with a year ago

Real Estate 1 September 2026

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Bar chart of the median monthly price of a room to rent in Lisbon, Funchal, Porto, Coimbra and Portalegre in the second quarter of 2026

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Real Estate 23 August 2026

The average mortgage in Portugal costs 414 euros a month. New borrowers pay 731

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Tugadaily bar chart showing the share of homes rented within 24 hours by Portuguese district in the second quarter of 2026: Évora 43, Leiria 17, Porto 7 and Lisbon 5

Real Estate 21 August 2026

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