How the figures are made

Where the numbers come from

• Asking prices: monthly reports from property portals, in € per m², by municipality and district.
• Bank valuations: INE's monthly figures for what banks value homes at when granting a mortgage, in € per m², by municipality. Used where there is no asking price.
• Sale prices: INE's median price per m² of homes sold over the last 12 months, published quarterly.
• Rents: INE's median rent per m² of new leases over the last 12 months, published quarterly.
• New homes: INE's monthly count of dwellings licensed for construction.
• Mortgage rates: the European Central Bank's interest rate on new house-purchase loans in Portugal, monthly.
• Income: INE's median household income net of IRS, by municipality, published once a year.
• Building: INE's counts of homes completed in new buildings since 1975, homes licensed since 2002, and, since 2011, both split by who builds and by number of bedrooms, plus buildings completed by kind of work.
• Population: INE's yearly resident population, net migration and births minus deaths by municipality, and foreign residents with legal status from 2021 to 2023.
• Empty homes: the 2021 census count of dwellings and of those standing empty, by municipality.
• Europe: Eurostat's house price index, building permits, construction prices, housing cost overburden, overcrowding, tenure and net migration for every EU member state.
• Public housing works: every contract to build or renovate housing published on Portal BASE since 2012 (IMPIC, on dados.gov.pt), classified by buyer and kind of work.

How areas add up

INE publishes the building and population figures by municipality, not by district, so a district's figures are the sum of its municipalities. A year is counted only when every municipality in the district has published it.

A public contract is placed in the municipalities its place of work names, and split evenly between them when there are several. Portugal's total also counts the contracts that name no place.

INE's detailed building tables, from 2011, count fewer homes than its long series for the same years, so the splits by builder and by bedrooms are shown as shares of their own totals.

How often it updates

Monthly, after INE publishes each month's bank valuations. Quarterly and annual series change when INE releases a new figure. Each page shows the date of its last update.

The 12-month outlook

The outlook is a statistical model of each region's own price history. The expected path weights the pace of the last six months at 70% and the median yearly change of the last five years at 30%. About a dozen indicators, such as mortgage rates, can tilt it by up to 0.2 points a month. The width of the range comes from how much the price moved month to month over the last two years.

The shaded band is the 80% range: if the model is right, the price lands inside it eight times in ten. It is not advice to buy or sell.

Affordability and buy or rent

Affordability takes a 90 m² home at the bank valuation, or at INE's median sale price where there is none, with a 10% deposit and a 30-year mortgage at the latest rate for new loans. It sets the monthly payment against the median net income of one household. Banco de Portugal limits the payment to 50% of net income.

Buy or rent compares the rent for the same 90 m² home, at INE's median sale price, with the costs of owning that are never recovered: mortgage interest, 1% of the price a year for IMI, insurance and upkeep, and the 3% a year the deposit and the 7% purchase costs could earn elsewhere. Repaying the loan is saving, so it is left out.

What the figures cannot tell you

• Asking prices are what sellers want, not what buyers pay, and bank valuations are not sale prices either. INE's sale prices are real but cover 12 months and come out quarterly, so they lag.
• In small municipalities INE keeps the monthly figures confidential and no other source covers them, so 87 of the 308 municipalities have no monthly price. Their pages show INE's quarterly and annual figures and link to their district.
• Income figures are about two years old, so affordability sets today's prices against older incomes.