Split illustration: on the left a row of British brick terraced houses in the rain under a grey sky, on the right a Portuguese house with a blue and white tiled facade at sunset

Real Estate 1 November 2026

Selling up in Britain to buy in Portugal? The price gap just got wider

Nationwide's October index shows UK house prices up just 0.5% on a year, the weakest since January 2024, with the average at £273,566 and no change on September. In Portugal, INE's bank valuation hit a record €2,278 per square metre in September, up 14.2%.

The British housing market has stalled. According to Nationwide’s house price index, UK homes were only 0.5% more expensive in October than a year earlier, the weakest annual growth since January 2024, and prices were flat on the month. The average now sits at £273,566.

Portugal is moving the other way. The valuation lenders carry out before approving a mortgage, the closest Portuguese match for Nationwide’s mortgage-based index, hit a new high in September: €2,278 per square metre, 14.2% more than a year before.

Two measures, one direction of travel

The two figures do not measure exactly the same thing, so treat the comparison as a sense of scale rather than a sum to the penny. But the gap is far too wide to be a quirk of method. INE’s price index, which tracks homes actually sold, tells the same story: up 16.5% in the second quarter, after 17.8% in the first.

On the British side, Nationwide blames the backdrop. Chief economist Robert Gardner points to tension in the Middle East pushing up energy costs and inflation fears, and to markets expecting the Bank of England to raise rates, which keeps mortgage pricing high. Surveyors report weak new buyer enquiries. Consumer confidence dipped in October too.

Why it matters if you are buying here

If you are selling in the UK with a view to buying in Portugal, the arithmetic has turned against you. Your British home is worth roughly what it was a year ago. The Portuguese square metre has climbed by more than 14%.

Foreign buyers are already pulling back. INE counted 1,890 purchases by them in the second quarter, 4.7% of the total and 10.3% fewer than a year earlier. It fits a wider euro-area picture in which banks are seeing fewer people apply for home loans.

By Duarte Figueiredo

Illustration: Tugadaily

Illustration of a glass house filled two-thirds of the way with gold coins, beside a shield with a tick, a key and a calendar with its last day marked

Real Estate 3 November 2026

Two-thirds of Portugal's youth mortgage guarantee is gone. The deadline will bite before the money does

By the end of September, banks had used 66.5% of the state guarantee for buyers aged 35 and under: €1.42bn across 48,859 loans. On our sums, at the third-quarter pace roughly €460m would still be left when access closes on 31 December. The 2027 Budget plans to extend the scheme.

Portuguese banks have now used 66.5% of the state guarantee that lets people aged 35 and under buy a first home with little or no deposit. That is €1.42bn guaranteed across 48,859 mortgages between January 2025 and the end of September, according to figures the Bank of Portugal released on 29 October. Two-thirds gone with three months still to run sounds tight. The arithmetic says otherwise. We ran the public numbers. If €1.42bn is 66.5% of what banks…

Illustration of a green apartment door with a key hanging beside it and two pages torn from a wall calendar falling away

Real Estate 2 November 2026

Portugal's rent bill now waits on Chega (and the minister insists evictions don't get easier)

Housing minister Miguel Pinto Luz said on 2 November that bill 103/XVII creates 'no new grounds' for eviction. What changes is the timing: two months of unpaid rent instead of three. The bill passed its first vote on 30 September only because Chega abstained, and is now in committee.

Portugal's housing minister used Monday's budget hearing to push back on the charge that has followed the rental reform since July. Miguel Pinto Luz said the new law creates "no new grounds" for eviction and that no one is evicted without a court ruling. In the same session he asked Chega to come and finish the text with the government. Those two remarks belong together. Without Chega, the bill dies. The parliamentary record for bill 103/XVII shows how…

Illustration of a salmon-pink Lisbon apartment building with iron balconies and green shutters between two neighbours, with a gold key and a house-shaped tag in the foreground

Real Estate 31 October 2026

Lisbon landlords can charge €2,066 for a five-bedroom flat and pay no income tax on it

Portaria 454/2026/1 has set the rent caps for Portugal's simplified affordable-rent scheme (RSAA) in all 308 municipalities. Rents at or below them are exempt from income tax. Only Lisbon tops €2,000, and in half the country the cap for a two-bed sits below €480.

A landlord who lets a five-bedroom flat in Lisbon for €2,000 a month can now pay no income tax at all on that rent. The condition is that the contract sits inside Portugal's Simplified Affordable Rent Scheme, the RSAA, and the number that makes it possible was published two weeks ago. Portaria 454/2026/1 of 13 October sets a maximum rent for every type of home in each of Portugal's 308 municipalities. Until it came out, the scheme was running on caps from…

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

Real Estate 30 October 2026

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.

Illustration of a white Portuguese house with a terracotta roof and azulejo band, a golden key, euro coins and a dotted arrow curving downwards across an evening sky

Real Estate 29 October 2026

Euro-area banks see mortgage demand shrinking into winter (Portugal's expect only a dip)

In the ECB bank lending survey published on 27 October, the net share of euro-area banks reporting lower demand for housing loans reached -27% in the third quarter, from -15% in the second, and banks expect -36% for the fourth. Portuguese banks, surveyed by Banco de Portugal, expect only a slight fall and unchanged lending criteria.

Fewer people across the euro area are asking banks for a mortgage, and banks think the slide has further to go. In the ECB's quarterly survey, published on 27 October, the net share of banks reporting lower demand for housing loans hit -27% in the third quarter. It was -15% in the second, and banks themselves had only expected -12%. For October to December they are pencilling in -36%.

Real Estate 25 October 2026

4 things Trump's new housing order actually changes

The 22 October executive order sets up a pilot to cancel mortgage insurance once owners have enough equity at today's values, puts HUD and the FHFA in charge of a manufactured-housing task force, makes a title-insurance alternative permanent and cuts rates on USDA and VA home loans.

Donald Trump signed another executive order on housing on 22 October, his third on the subject this year. It goes by the plain title Decreasing Housing Costs for the American People, and it does not touch prices directly. It goes after the costs that pile up around buying, financing and refinancing a home. There are four moving parts. Americans who buy with a small deposit pay mortgage insurance every month until they hold enough equity. The order tells…

Tugadaily chart: share of home owners aged 25-34 across five generations, rising from 42% to 70% and falling back to 42%

Real Estate 24 October 2026

Portugal's 25-to-34-year-olds own their homes at the same rate as in 1981: 42%

Pordata's census figures show that 70% of Portuguese born in 1967-76 owned their home by 25-34, against 42% for those born in 1987-96, the same share as the 1947-56 generation. Prices rose 41.5% between 2020 and 2025, the steepest climb among the EU countries where they rose.

Owning your home by your early thirties used to be normal in Portugal. Among people born between 1967 and 1976, 70% owned the place they lived in when they were 25 to 34. For those born between 1987 and 1996, that age arrived with 42%. The figure comes from the first issue of "Factualmente", a new format from Pordata, the statistics database run by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation. Its debut, published on 23 October, is about housing, and it…

Real Estate 28 September 2026

The ultra-rich now own nearly four homes each. Portugal is well placed to be one of them

Knight Frank's Residence Report 2026/27 counts 3.8 homes per ultra-high-net-worth owner, up from 2.9 in under a decade, and names Lisbon, the Algarve and Comporta among the places well placed to catch that money.

Less than a decade ago, the average ultra-wealthy owner had 2.9 homes. Today that figure is 3.8. It is the headline number in the Residence Report 2026/27, published by Knight Frank in association with Quintela + Penalva, and it says something about where top-tier money is actually going: not into one bigger house, but into more houses, spread across more places. Portugal shows up well on that map. The report sees Lisbon, the Algarve and Comporta as a…

Real Estate 22 September 2026

Lisbon debuts on the UBS bubble index (in the elevated-risk tier, next to Miami and Dubai)

The Swiss bank added Lisbon and Seoul to its sample this year, and the two newcomers posted the largest rises in bubble risk of any city. Lisbon sits with Miami, Dubai, Seoul and Geneva after a decade of real house prices climbing almost 7% a year.

Being added to a housing bubble index is not the kind of debut a city puts on a poster. Lisbon has just made one. UBS has published its Global Real Estate Bubble Index every year for twelve years, and the 2026 edition covers 23 cities. The two new entries are Lisbon and Seoul, and those two recorded the biggest increases in bubble risk in the whole survey. Lisbon went straight into the elevated-risk band alongside Miami, Dubai, Seoul and Geneva. Only…

Bar chart of median rent on new contracts by sub-region in the first quarter of 2026: Greater Lisbon €14.38 per square metre, Madeira 11.97, Setúbal peninsula 11.35, Algarve 10.71, Porto metro area 10.13 and the national median 9.46, noting that the city of Lisbon itself stands at 17.42

Real Estate 22 September 2026

Did cutting 6,765 short-term lets bring Lisbon rents down? The numbers say no

The city cancelled about 40% of its short-term rental registrations in February, taking active listings from nearly 20,000 to 11,779. In the quarter that covers the cut, median rent on new contracts in Lisbon rose 8.2% to €17.42 per square metre, the highest in the country.

For years the standard answer to Lisbon's housing costs was Airbnb. Take the short-term lets out of the market, the argument ran, and the flats come back to ordinary tenants. Lisbon has now done exactly that, at scale, and there are finally numbers showing what happened next. On 1 February the city council finished an administrative clean-up of its register and cancelled 6,765 short-term rental licences, roughly 40% of the city's total. Most were ghost…

Real Estate 22 September 2026

Portugal's BUPi land registration is free until 30 September, then the fees come back

Identifying and registering rural and mixed plots at the Balcão Único do Prédio costs nothing until 30 September 2026, after which the fees return. Since April a plot also cannot change hands without a georeferenced graphic representation on file.

There are nine days left, today included, on a deadline nobody is counting down, and missing it costs money. Until 30 September 2026, identifying and registering a rural or mixed plot at the Balcão Único do Prédio is free — the identification itself, and the registration fees with it. From 1 October, the charges come back. The free window is not new. It has been extended before, and the extension that runs out this month came in Decreto-Lei n.º 87/2026,…

Tugadaily bar chart of the days between the decree-law and the portaria setting maximum rents: 15 days in 2019, a 30-day legal limit, and 120 days in 2026 and still counting

Real Estate 17 September 2026

The rule that sets Portugal's affordable rents is 90 days past its own legal deadline

The simplified regime has had legal effect since 1 September, but the maximum rent by property type only exists once a portaria is published. Article 16 of the decree-law gave the government 30 days from 20 May. In 2019 the equivalent took 15.

Everyone reported that Portugal's new affordable-rent regime is waiting on a portaria. Nobody checked when that portaria was supposed to arrive. We read the decree-law, and the answer is written into it. The Simplified Affordable Rent Regime was created by Decreto-Lei 97/2026 of 20 May. Article 16, headed Regulation, gives the government 30 days from publication to approve the portarias the regime needs, and the missing one is precisely among them. Thirty…

Real Estate 14 September 2026

The EU's new housing law is not just an Airbnb law (empty flats and second homes are in it too)

The European Commission tabled the Affordable Housing Act on 9 September. It bans nothing by itself — it gives councils a shared yardstick for proving housing pressure before they restrict anything.

The story reached Portugal last week wearing a single label: Brussels is going to regulate short-term rentals. True enough, and nowhere near the whole of it. What the European Commission tabled on 9 September is called the Affordable Housing Act and, on the Commission's own page for it, it reaches the rules authorities already write about short-term rentals, second homes and vacant dwellings. All three, not just the one everybody argues about.

Tugadaily chart showing the year-on-year fall in buildings licensed in Q2 2026: Greater Lisbon -35.1%, Algarve -24.9%, Setúbal Peninsula -20.3%, Portugal -7.1%

Real Estate 12 September 2026

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…