Persistent poverty in Portugal rises to 9.5% in 2025 as housing costs deepen hardship
Almost half of Portugal's adults in poverty have jobs, the EAPN Portugal report says, and counting housing costs lifts the poverty rate from 15.4% to 26.8%.
Almost half of the adults living in poverty in Portugal have jobs, according to a report from EAPN Portugal, part of the European Anti-Poverty Network. The figures cover 2025 and are due to be presented at the XVIII National Forum on Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion in Porto on Thursday, 15 October.
Work is not a safeguard
The report puts 47.6% of adults in poverty in employment, about 33% as employees and 14.4% as self-employed. The in-work poverty rate is 8.6% overall, rising to 10.7% for people on temporary contracts, 19% for underemployed part-time workers and 20.5% for people who have worked for less than a year. Single-parent households in work are the most exposed group, with their rate jumping from 22.1% to 26% and the risk of poverty or social exclusion reaching 40.7%. Women make up 55% of people in poverty, and people over 65 account for about a fifth of the total.
Housing costs and benefits
The report puts housing at the centre of the picture. When housing costs are counted, the poverty rate rises from 15.4% to 26.8%, which the report calls a persistent amplifier of poverty and exclusion that hits new generations hardest, and it calls for sector policies on housing at affordable prices.
- Excluding housing costs
- 15.4 %
- Including housing costs
- 26.8 %
45.4% of people in poverty received no social benefits in 2025, according to JN. Vicente said the welfare system needs to be strengthened:
Our system is not very effective. We are one of the countries that reduce the poverty risk rate the least.
Fewer people below the line
Overall, the number at risk of poverty fell below two million for the first time since 2015, a rate of 18.6% and 1.1 percentage points lower than the year before. Monetary poverty dropped to 15.4% as median income rose, lifting the poverty threshold to 723.25 euros a month. Portugal sits below the EU average of 16.3% and in the middle of the EU ranking. Vicente nonetheless predicted that upcoming data may show a very different picture as living costs rise, since the current figures reflect 2024 incomes.
The fall in the indicators does not mean poverty has stopped shaping people's everyday lives.
Persistent poverty
A separate NOVA SBE study, Trajetórias da Pobreza e da Privação, published on Wednesday, 14 October, followed 6,057 people in the national living conditions survey from 2022 to 2025. It found that 61.7% of people in poverty in 2025 were in persistent poverty, meaning they had also been poor in at least two of the three previous years.
The persistent poverty rate fell from 13.6% in 2015 to a low of 7.1% in 2024, then rose to 9.5% in 2025, a reversal the researchers described as the inversion of a recent trend. Diário de Notícias, citing Lusa, put the 2024 figure at around 7.4%.
- 2015
- 13.6 %
- 2024
- 7.1 %
- 2025
- 9.5 %
The results show that the poverty rate for a given year hides very different trajectories.