Identifying and registering rural and mixed plots at the Balcão Único do Prédio costs nothing until 30 September 2026, after which the fees return. Since April a plot also cannot change hands without a georeferenced graphic representation on file.

By Duarte Figueiredo

Image: AJSL48 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Knight Frank's Residence Report 2026/27 counts 3.8 homes per ultra-high-net-worth owner, up from 2.9 in under a decade, and names Lisbon, the Algarve and Comporta among the places well placed to catch that money.

Less than a decade ago, the average ultra-wealthy owner had 2.9 homes. Today that figure is 3.8. It is the headline number in the Residence Report 2026/27, published by Knight Frank in association with Quintela + Penalva, and it says something about where top-tier money is actually going: not into one bigger house, but into more houses, spread across more places. Portugal shows up well on that map. The report sees Lisbon, the Algarve and Comporta as a…

A running tracker of Portugal's housing market — the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability. Updated with each new data release.

We gather here, in one place, how Portugal's housing market is moving. Instead of one article per data point, we update this page with the essentials: the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability for buyers and renters — which since 1 August also runs through the new mortgage rules, with the debt-service cap down to 45%. Official data is at INE.

The Swiss bank added Lisbon and Seoul to its sample this year, and the two newcomers posted the largest rises in bubble risk of any city. Lisbon sits with Miami, Dubai, Seoul and Geneva after a decade of real house prices climbing almost 7% a year.

Being added to a housing bubble index is not the kind of debut a city puts on a poster. Lisbon has just made one. UBS has published its Global Real Estate Bubble Index every year for twelve years, and the 2026 edition covers 23 cities. The two new entries are Lisbon and Seoul, and those two recorded the biggest increases in bubble risk in the whole survey. Lisbon went straight into the elevated-risk band alongside Miami, Dubai, Seoul and Geneva. Only…

The city cancelled about 40% of its short-term rental registrations in February, taking active listings from nearly 20,000 to 11,779. In the quarter that covers the cut, median rent on new contracts in Lisbon rose 8.2% to €17.42 per square metre, the highest in the country.

For years the standard answer to Lisbon's housing costs was Airbnb. Take the short-term lets out of the market, the argument ran, and the flats come back to ordinary tenants. Lisbon has now done exactly that, at scale, and there are finally numbers showing what happened next. On 1 February the city council finished an administrative clean-up of its register and cancelled 6,765 short-term rental licences, roughly 40% of the city's total. Most were ghost…

The simplified regime has had legal effect since 1 September, but the maximum rent by property type only exists once a portaria is published. Article 16 of the decree-law gave the government 30 days from 20 May. In 2019 the equivalent took 15.

Everyone reported that Portugal's new affordable-rent regime is waiting on a portaria. Nobody checked when that portaria was supposed to arrive. We read the decree-law, and the answer is written into it. The Simplified Affordable Rent Regime was created by Decreto-Lei 97/2026 of 20 May. Article 16, headed Regulation, gives the government 30 days from publication to approve the portarias the regime needs, and the missing one is precisely among them. Thirty…

The European Commission tabled the Affordable Housing Act on 9 September. It bans nothing by itself — it gives councils a shared yardstick for proving housing pressure before they restrict anything.

The story reached Portugal last week wearing a single label: Brussels is going to regulate short-term rentals. True enough, and nowhere near the whole of it. What the European Commission tabled on 9 September is called the Affordable Housing Act and, on the Commission's own page for it, it reaches the rules authorities already write about short-term rentals, second homes and vacant dwellings. All three, not just the one everybody argues about.

Councils licensed 6,162 buildings between April and June, down 7.1% in a year. Greater Lisbon fell 35.1% and the Algarve 24.9%, while new-build dwellings licensed rose 10.8% to 11,834.

Portuguese councils granted permits to 6,162 buildings between April and June. That is 7.1% fewer than in the same quarter of 2025 — and, oddly enough, an improvement on the start of the year, when the drop was running at 9.7%. Buried further down the release is the number that matters if you are house-hunting. Dwellings licensed in new builds for family housing rose 10.8%, to 11,834. Fewer buildings, then, but more homes inside each one. Apartment blocks…

The revised Évora urban plan proposes more than seven thousand dwellings, a health cluster beside the new hospital and fresh business areas. Anyone can file comments until 12 October.

Évora opened its consultation on Monday and it stays open until 12 October. The revised Urban Plan for the city is now public, and any person or organisation can read it and respond. What is proposed is substantial: more than 7,000 new dwellings, a health cluster next to the hospital still under construction, and new land set aside for economic activity. Mayor Carlos Zorrinho called it a plan for the coming decade, built so the city can break what he…

Median asking prices per square metre rose 22.9% year on year in Santarém in August, against 4% in Lisbon. Nationally the figure held at 3,207 euros per square metre, barely moved from July.

Santarém. That is the Portuguese district where homes for sale gained the most value over the past year, with an annual rise of 22.9% in August, according to the idealista price index. Lisbon, over the same period, rose 4%. Behind Santarém come Pico Island at 20.8%, Terceira at 19.6%, Évora at 19.5% and Viseu at 17.1%. Portalegre and Coimbra follow, both at 17%. Of the 25 districts and islands measured, exactly one fell: Faial Island, down 10.1%.

Asking rents were up 4.9% year on year in August, to a median of €18.1 per square metre, according to idealista's index. Viana do Castelo led the rises at 32.2% in the city, while Porto fell 6.3%.

If you are scrolling rental listings right now, the national average matters less than the number for the place you actually want to live. The national figure says asking rents rose 4.9% in August against the same month last year, to a median of €18.1 per square metre. What happens district by district is a very different story. Idealista's price index shows rents up over twelve months in six of the seven regions it tracks. The exception is the North,…

An atlas published in the Journal of Maps by two TU Wien researchers asks how much housing an average local salary buys on a 30-year mortgage. Greater Lisbon lands among the European regions where the answer is under 50 square metres.

This study asks a more useful question than the usual one. Not what a house costs. How many square metres an average local salary buys, if a third of income goes to a thirty-year mortgage. Run that way, the Lisbon metropolitan area falls into the group of European regions where an average salary does not stretch to 50 square metres. Portugal as a whole shows up among the continent's hardest places to buy a home on the national wage, alongside the…

The target Porto City Council set in 2023 was a thousand affordable rental homes by 2026. Porto Vivo will close the year managing 588 — and the target has just moved to 1,600 homes by 2029.

In August 2023 Porto City Council posted leaflets through the city's letterboxes asking residents to lend it their empty flats. The goal was written on the municipal company's own website: a thousand homes under the affordable rent scheme by 2026. It is now September 2026. Porto Vivo will finish the year managing 588. That gap is a measurement, not an accusation. It is 412 homes short, and the council has done what councils tend to do when a deadline…

The Bank for International Settlements looked at 57 economies. Real house prices fell in 14 of them and fell 1.2% globally — and nowhere rose faster than Portugal.

If you want to understand Portuguese housing, the most useful thing you can do is look somewhere else. The Bank for International Settlements — the central bankers' central bank — has just run the numbers on 57 economies. Real house prices rose in 39 of them, held steady in four and fell in 14. Nowhere did they rise as fast as here. Portugal posted 15.2% real annual growth in the first quarter, meaning after inflation has been stripped out. North…

The Simplified Affordable Rental Regime came into force on 1 September and wipes out income tax on rent entirely, provided the rent stays under a municipal ceiling. The alternative, a flat 10%, expires in 2029.

Anyone with a flat to let in Portugal woke up on 1 September with two sums to do, and the answer changes from one council to the next. The Simplified Affordable Rental Regime, known here by its initials RSAA, has replaced the old rental support programme, and a second instrument came into force alongside it for developers. Both came out of the housing tax package approved in May. The first sum is the easy one. A residential tenancy with rent up to 2,300…