Immigration drives Portugal’s population to record high

Monday brought the news that policymakers, economists and local authorities had been waiting for. After years in which figures on immigration seemed to ‘stay the same’, no matter how things ‘felt on the ground’, INE statistics institute has delivered an almost up-to-date snapshot of the country, compiling numbers as per 2025 – and revealing that Portugal is now a country with more people living in it than ever before (11,424,031), of which a staggering 14% are foreigners.

In the space of just four years, the number of foreigners living in Portugal went from 748,155 to almost 1.6 million. They more than doubled.

The exponential leap, as the current government has explained on many occasions, resulted from an almost “complete lack of controls on immigration”. There was even a mechanism that allowed people to arrive on tourist visas, and then ‘express the interest’ to find a job, and effectively never leave.

Minister for the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, said on Monday that had it not been for the controls the AD government started bringing in after winning the 2024 elections, foreigner numbers today would be a great deal higher – adding even more pressure to challenged public services.

He suggested the country would have had one foreigner to every five Portuguese today if AD hadn’t started acting as it has – allowing immigration, but according to economic needs; not the desires of incoming nationalities.

As to those nationalities, Brazil is the front-runner, with 574,195 residents in Portugal — equivalent to 35.9% of all foreign nationals. Like numbers generally, the Brazilian population has more than doubled since 2021.

The next largest foreign communities are:

Angola: 103,140 residents

India: 93,683

Cape Verde: 76,099

Nepal: 56,866

Bangladesh: 56,724

Guinea-Bissau: 53,555

But as INE points out, Portugal – a country that without immigration would be steadily shrinking – currently boasts “more than 115 nationalities” among its population.

Algarve has highest proportion of foreign residents

The population remains concentrated in the north, with 3.79 million residents, or 33.2% of the national total.

Greater Lisbon accounts for 21.1%, followed by the Centre region with 15.5%.

However, the fastest growth has occurred in areas most exposed to migration and urban expansion.

The Algarve, for instance, recorded the strongest population increase between 2021 and 2025 – growing by 13.8%, ahead of the Setúbal Peninsula (12.8%), Greater Lisbon (10.6%) and Oeste e Vale do Tejo (9.7%).

Greater Lisbon remains home to 34.2% of all foreign residents in Portugal – but the Algarve has the highest concentration, with foreign nationals accounting for 27.9% of the region’s population. In some municipalities (certainly in the rural municipality of Aljezur), foreign nationals in the last Census accounted for almost 50% of the local population.

The majority of incoming foreigners (otherwise dubbed ‘immigrants’) are of work age, and therefore likely to start families, if they haven’t already got them. The new arrivals are invariably working – and have particularly helped fill previous labour shortages across sectors ranging from agriculture and construction to tourism and services.

The ‘miracle’ of immigration has been in powering ‘economic growth’: tax revenue has poured in to shore up the Social Security system (which is increasingly needed by the otherwise ageing population).

The downsides are in the demands that so many people arriving, over such a short period of time, have created.

INE’s numbers show that between 2017 and 2024, foreign pupils in public schools increased from 40,000 to 70,000; primary healthcare consultations involving foreign citizens rose from 326,000 to 1.4 million; and foreign patients registered with Portugal’s SNS national health service increased from 328,000 to 871,000.

Then there are the difficulties with affordable housing – and it is easy to see how the ‘miracle’ has also brought disadvantages.

But what cannot be argued is that, without immigration, Portugal would be in a very bad place indeed.

With 188.8 elderly people for every 100 young people in 2025, the country would have reached the stage (or be staring closely at it) where the working population’s Social Security contributions could not cover the demands of pensions.

Thanks to incoming foreigners, this is not the case right now – but the population is still ageing. For instance, in 2021, there were fewer elderly to young people than there were in 2025: so the country is ‘still not out of the woods’.

INE’s statistics show that children under the age of 14 represent just 12.4% of the population, while the median age, in spite of all the work-age arrivals, still stands at 45.8 years.

Thus, the ‘snapshot’ of Portugal in 2025 shows a number of realities: immigration is changing the country, but the country could not survive without it. It is simply a question of managing a balance – which is so much easier said than done.

Nearly 459,000 residence cards issued

The government has also released fresh details on the immigration regularisation drive carried out by AIMA, the state agency overseeing immigration.

According to Minister Leitão Amaro, the government inherited approximately 933,000 pending immigration cases, of which 450,000 involved the now extinct ‘manifestation of interest’ mechanism (the process where tourists could indicate that they would like to find work, and essentially never leave). Of the latter, 98% have now been processed.

In total, authorities have issued 458,989 residence cards and recorded:

933,000 notifications;

763,000 appointments;

568,000 immigrants attended;

528,000 decisions;

473,000 approvals;

Around 52,000 rejections.

This operation involved AIMA, a dedicated mission structure and an external pool of lawyers and solicitors, who have collectively received around €3.7 million for their work, writes Executive Digest. This is the other aspect of immigration: it brings a great deal in the way of ‘money’ into the country just to start the process of legalisation.

But more than anything else, Monday’s figures, and explanations, may put the whole ‘immigration debate’ into better perspective, bearing in mind that, without it, Portugal would be steadily disappearing.