Portugal tops the EU for homes outrunning incomes, and 2025 was the worst year yet
Eurostat's house price-to-income ratio rose 60.8% in Portugal between 2015 and 2025, the biggest rise in the EU and almost nine times the EU's 6.8%. In the underlying series, 2025 alone added 12.1%, the steepest year since 2001, leaving Portugal 37% above its long-term average, the highest reading in the 27.
If every property listing seems to make your pay packet look smaller, Eurostat has the numbers to back you up. Between 2015 and 2025 the ratio of house prices to household income per person rose 60.8% in Portugal, the largest increase of any EU country, according to Eurostat’s release on Monday. Across the EU it rose 6.8%. Portugal’s rise is almost nine times that.
Next come the Netherlands (+34.3%), Hungary (+26.5%), Czechia (+25.8%) and Spain (+24.5%). The ratio fell in ten countries, led by Romania (-42.8%).
What does the house price-to-income ratio measure?
How fast homes get dearer compared with what people earn, not what a home actually costs. If prices and incomes grow at the same pace, the ratio stays flat. If prices run ahead, it climbs.
To put that in round numbers: a home that cost the equivalent of five years’ income in 2015 would, at this pace, cost about eight today. That is why Eurostat itself warns the figure doesn’t rank countries by how expensive housing is in absolute terms. It shows who got worse fastest, not who is worst off.
When did Portugal’s affordability gap widen fastest?
We pulled Eurostat’s full series (dataset tipsho60) and the answer is uncomfortable: last year. In 2025 Portugal’s ratio rose 12.1% in a single year, the biggest annual jump since the series begins in 2001. The previous worst was 2020, at 9.3%. By our sums, more than a quarter (28.5%) of the whole decade’s rise happened in 2025 alone.
The same dataset has a second reading, which compares each country’s ratio with its own long-term average since 2000, and which the European Commission uses as an early warning of housing imbalances. In 2015 Portugal sat 15% below that average. In 2025 it is 37% above, the highest in the EU, ahead of Czechia (18%) and Austria (16%). The EU as a whole is almost exactly on its average (+0.03%).
What it means if you are house-hunting
That the squeeze did not ease as the decade closed. Prices are still pulling away from wages, and that gap is what buyers and renters feel every month. We track the quarterly numbers in our house prices in Portugal tracker, where the next INE index will show whether 2026 is heading the same way.
Illustrative · Photo: Fausto Ferreira / Pexels
