The rate that prices four in ten Portuguese mortgages just hit a 21-month high
Six-month Euribor fixed at 2.737% on Thursday, its highest since 22 November 2024. All three maturities rose on the same day, and the six-month is the one most Portuguese loans are tied to.
Six-month Euribor fixed at 2.737% on Thursday, the highest it has been since 22 November 2024. That is very nearly 21 months, and the move came on a day when all three maturities went up together: the twelve-month added 0.013 points to 2.990%, the three-month added 0.015 to 2.507%.
None of those numbers is alarming on its own. What matters is where the increase lands, and it lands on the maturity most Portuguese households actually have in their contract. The reference figures are the daily fixings published by the European Money Markets Institute.
Why the six-month is the one that counts
Banco de Portugal figures for June put the six-month Euribor behind 39.9% of the stock of variable-rate loans for a permanent own home. Close to four in every ten contracts. The switch happened in January 2024, when the six-month overtook the twelve-month as the standard index on Portuguese variable-rate mortgages, and it has set the monthly bill for most of them ever since.
What that is worth in euros
A caveat before the arithmetic. A contract reset does not use one day’s fixing, it uses the month’s average. What follows is a snapshot of Thursday’s market, not the number that will land on a statement.
We ran it on a 150,000 euro loan over 30 years with a 1% spread, applying today’s fixings. At the three-month rate the payment would be 674 euros. At the six-month, 694. At the twelve-month, 715. The gap between the shortest and longest maturity is 41 euros a month, close to 500 euros over a year, on the same loan with the same spread.
What to do with the figure
If a reset is coming up, the useful detail is not the headline but the maturity written into your own contract. It is on the statement, plenty of borrowers have never checked it, and it decides everything else. We ran the same numbers for August’s reset, and the mechanics have not changed.
On the income side, nothing offsets the rise: average pay in the second quarter came in at 1,835 euros gross, and month-by-month house prices sit in our ongoing tracker. The policy rates that anchor the whole chain are published on the European Central Bank site.
Chart: Tugadaily · Euribor fixings of 20/08/2026, own calculation