Portugal
Profile written September 2026 · figures updated nightly
Where things stand
The latest published reading for each measure, with the last five years beside it.
the ECB's rate, which Portugal has shared since 1999
01Structure
Portugal is a small, services-led economy whose structure changed substantially after its sovereign debt crisis. Industry accounts for about thirteen per cent of value added — textiles, footwear, cork, paper and vehicle components — while tourism and, increasingly, technology and business services around Lisbon and Porto have become the growth sectors.1
Tourism is the defining weight: more than thirty million visitors a year for a population of about ten million, which ties the economy to European household incomes and air travel in the way section 02 describes.
02Trade and exposure
Exports are a little over two fifths of output, and the service half of them — above all tourism — has kept the current account in surplus even when demand for Portuguese goods was weak.2 Spain is the largest trading partner by a distance, followed by France and Germany.
Portugal's goods exports are concentrated in traditional sectors competing on cost with producers further east and in Asia, which is one reason productivity growth, rather than market access, is the constraint most often named.
03Energy and resources
Portugal imports around two thirds of the energy it uses, but its electricity is among the cleanest in Europe: renewables produced about seventy-nine per cent of generation in 2024 and roughly a third of primary energy needs.3 Wind, hydro and a fast-growing solar fleet make up most of it.
That limits how far a gas-price shock reaches electricity, as in Spain, and the Iberian grid's thin connection to France limits in the same way how much surplus power can be sold north.
04Labour and demography
Around eighty per cent of 20- to 64-year-olds are in work, above the euro-area average, but youth unemployment runs near twenty per cent. Emigration has been the long-standing drain: educated young Portuguese have left in large numbers since the crisis years, and demographic trends mean labour supply is expected to slow.2
Immigration has partly offset the loss, and tax regimes for foreign residents and investors drew a new population to Lisbon and the Algarve. Several of those programmes have since been narrowed, because their effect on housing costs became a domestic political problem.1
05Public finances
The fiscal story of the past decade is a turnaround. Portugal needed a €78 billion rescue from the European Union and the IMF in 2011; since then public debt has fallen from a pandemic peak of about 134 per cent of GDP to just under 90 per cent, and the budget recorded a surplus for the third year running in 2025.2
Few advanced economies have reduced a debt ratio that fast without a default or a currency devaluation, and it has turned Portugal from a crisis case into one of the more fiscally stable members of the currency area.
06Money and prices
Portugal has set no policy rate of its own since 1999; the rate shown above is the European Central Bank's. Its crisis was the clearest case of what the common rate cannot do: a member with a large external debt and no exchange rate to adjust had to regain competitiveness through wages and prices over a decade.
With public debt falling and a current-account surplus, the spread over German bonds that dominated that period has largely closed.
07What the models expect
These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.
Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.63 on consumer price inflation, 2.81 on real gdp, 0.25 on unemployment rate, 0.60 on central bank policy rate, 8.01 on government debt.
08Structural indicators
The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.
| Measure | Value | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industry, share of gross value added | 13.0% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Exports, share of GDP | 43.7% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Energy import dependency | 64.5% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| R&D spending, share of GDP | 1.7% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| Employment rate, ages 20–64 | 79.6% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Youth unemployment rate | 20.1% | Jul 2026 | Eurostat |
| Government balance | +0.7% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Renewables, share of electricity | ~79% | 2024 | OECD |
09Sources and method
Live figures: Eurostat, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-11, next review September 2027.
- Visitor numbers, the Lisbon technology sector and the narrowing of foreign-resident regimes — Portugal Economy 2026
- Debt reduction since 2020, the surpluses, tourism and labour supply — IMF, 2026 Article IV consultation
- Renewable shares of electricity and primary energy — OECD Economic Surveys: Portugal 2026