Portugal's foreign population grew 2.7% last year. In 2022 it grew 39%
AIMA's annual report closes 2025 with 1,585,854 foreign residents and 42,157 added over the year, against 238,864 in 2024. It is the slowest rate in the whole series the agency publishes, which starts in 2017, and the ranking shifted too: Angola has moved ahead of India.
There is a way of reading AIMA’s annual report that skips the headline total and tells you far more. Put four years next to each other.
In 2022, Portugal’s foreign resident population grew by 39%. In 2023, by 31.4%. In 2024, by 18.3%. In 2025, by 2.7%. That is the slowest annual growth anywhere in the series the agency publishes, which begins in 2017.
At the end of last year there were 1,585,854 foreign citizens legally resident in the country. Over the course of 2025 it gained 42,157 residents, against 238,864 the year before. The agency describes this as a stabilisation of new arrivals and the consolidation of a community already structurally part of the country’s economic and social life.
One caveat worth carrying
These figures do not measure how many people arrived. They measure residence permits in force, which is a different thing: people who leave, who lose a permit, or who naturalise all move the total, and AIMA is still running the data correction and validation exercise it began in 2024. That is why the same report is being quoted with two different numbers. The Secretary of State for Migration spoke of an increase of 38,000 between 2024 and 2025, in line with national statistics office estimates, while the report’s own series gives 42,157. Both tell the same story, and it is worth knowing which one you are citing.
Who is here
Brazilians are still far and away the largest group at 493,622 people, close to a third of all foreign residents and around ten thousand more than a year earlier.
Behind them sits a swap almost nobody picked up. Angola is now second with 99,050 residents, ahead of India on 91,405. The Indian community, which had been growing quickly, shrank and lost the position. Then come Ukraine (84,889), Cape Verde (71,005), Bangladesh (55,579), Nepal (53,304) and Guinea-Bissau (51,935). The United Kingdom, on 47,726, is the largest non-Portuguese-speaking European community.
Across the year AIMA issued more than half a million permits: 337,880 grants and 189,331 renewals, from 671,273 appointments and 605,890 in-person services. If you are tracking deadlines, renewals and biometrics, the running record lives in our AIMA tracker.
The slowdown is already showing up outside the migration statistics. On the same day, UBS placed Lisbon in its housing bubble index and named a more selective immigration policy as one reason the city’s engine is losing power. The full report sits on AIMA’s reports page.
Chart: Tugadaily · Data: AIMA
