Demographics of Portugal
- 10 min read
- 8 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Demography, Portugal and Population density
High fertility and birth rates persisted until the 1980s, after which they started to dramatically decline, leading to rapid population aging. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, almost one in five Portuguese was over 65 years old. Lately, Portugal has been experiencing a short growth in birth rates. The total fertility rate has climbed from an all-time low of 1.21 children per woman in 2013 to 1.43 in 2022, still well below replacement level.
Portugal is a fairly linguistically and religiously homogeneous country. Ethnically, the Portuguese people form a big majority of the total population in Portugal. The Portuguese people are mainly a combination of ancient paleolithic populations, and the proto-Celtic, Celtic, and the para-Celtic Lusitanians. Some other groups, like the Romans, Germanic (Visigoths, Suevi, Buri, Alans and Vandals) and later the Moorish (Arabs and Berber), Sephardic Jewish, and the French also passed through the country.
Today, Brazilians, Britons, Indians, Italians, French, Ukrainians, Nepalis and countries members of PALOP (Portuguese-speaking African countries) are the main immigrants and form the major foreign communities in the country.
Portuguese is spoken throughout the country, with only some villages near the northern municipality of Miranda do Douro speaking Mirandese, locally recognised as a co-official language.
In the 2020s, Portugal reached 11 million people due to extensive immigration from other countries, most notably the former Portuguese colonies.
Population
Due to a decrease in emigration and an increase in immigration during the late 1990s and early 2000s, Portugal's population grew steadily, reaching a peak of 10,573,479 in December 2009. However, following the 2008 financial crisis, emigration surged and immigration declined, and these trends, combined with persistently low birth rates and an aging population, led to a gradual population decline. By 2018, the population had decreased by about 2.27% from its 2009 peak. From then onwards, however, net migration became positive again, supported by a renewed influx of immigrants and a slight rise in birth rates. As a result, Portugal's population resumed growth and, by 2021, had already surpassed the 2009 peak. In 2025, Portugal's statistic service revealed that 10,74 million people lived in Portugal, using the pre-2026 methodology.
In 2026, it became known that Portugal's population exceeded the milestone of 11 million people for the first time. The revelation came after INE revised upwards its population estimates for Portugal in the period 2021-26, as the INE adopted a new methodology to estimate the population of Portugal. The new methodology used from 2026 onwards is aiming to better capture the realities of migratory movements in Portugal, increase the consistency of the population statistics with other official statistics and produce more analytical and detailed population statistics as required by the newer European Union directives.
The distribution of the population is widely uneven; the most densely populated areas are the Lisbon metropolitan area (which contains well above a quarter of the country's population), the metropolitan areas of Porto and the Atlantic coast, while other vast areas are very sparsely populated, like the plateaus of Alentejo, the Trás-os-Montes and Serra da Estrela highlands, and the lesser islands of the Azores archipelago.
View source data. View source data. View source data.
Note: Crude migration change (per 1000) is a trend analysis, an extrapolation based average population change (current year minus previous) minus natural change of the current year (see table vital statistics). As average population is an estimate of the population in the middle of the year and not end of the year.
The population of the country almost doubled during the twentieth century (+91%), but the pattern of growth was extremely uneven due to large-scale internal migration from the rural areas to the industrial cities of Lisbon and Porto, a phenomenon which happened as a consequence of the robust economic growth and structural modernisation, owing to a liberalisation of the economy of the 1960s.
- Total population
- 11,424,031 (2025 official INE estimate)
- Age structure of the resident population
- 2025 official INE estimate:
- 0-14 years: 12.36% (male 722,694 /female 688,913)
- 15-64 years: 64.31% (male 3,711,103 /female 3,635,544)
- 65 years and over: 23.33% (male 1,153,932/female 1,511,845)
- Median age
- 2025 official INE estimate:
- total: 45.8 years
- male: 43.6 years
- female: 48.0 years
- Birth rate
- 7.7 births/1,000 population (2025 official INE estimate)
- Death rate
- 10.7 deaths/1,000 population (2025 official INE estimate)
- Total fertility rate
- 1.30 children born/woman (2025 official INE estimate)
- Net migration rate
- 6.2 net migrant(s)/1,000 population (2025 official INE estimate)
- Population growth rate
- + 0.32 % (2025 official INE estimate)
- Mother's mean age at first birth
- 30.3 years (2024 official INE estimate)
- Life expectancy at birth
Source: UN World Population Prospects
- Infant mortality rate
- 2025 official INE estimate:
- total: 2.80 deaths/1,000 live births. Country comparison to the world: 216th
- male: 3.29 deaths/1,000 live births
- female: 2.29 deaths/1,000 live births
- Infant mortality rate since 1960
- Dependency ratios
- 2022 official INE estimate:
- total dependency ratio: 58.4
- youth dependency ratio: 20.44
- elderly dependency ratio: 37.96
- potential support ratio: 2.63
- Urbanization
- urban population: 73.38% of total population (2020 official INE estimate)
- rate of urbanization: 0.44% annual rate of change (2020-25 est.)
- Sex ratio
- 2022 official INE estimate:
- at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female
- under 15 years: 1.05 male(s)/female
- 15–64 years: 0.96 male(s)/female
- 65 years and over: 0.76 male(s)/female
- total population: 0.90 male(s)/female
Sign in to keep reading
7 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Vital statistics
Vital statistics since 1890
Source:
Notable events in Portuguese demographics:
- 1910 – 5 October 1910 revolution;
- 1914–1919 – World War I;
- 1918–1920 – Spanish flu
- 1961–1974 – Portuguese Colonial War and massive emigration of thousands of Portuguese citizens;
- 1974–1976 – Arrival of nearly 600,000 Portuguese citizens, called Returnees, from African colonies;
- 2010–2014 – Portuguese financial crisis and bailout, with a surge in emigration of young population;
- 2020–present – Big population increase due to wave of immigrants;
According to Statistics Portugal, in the year 2025, 56,804 children (64.7%) were born to Portuguese-born mothers, while 30,960 (35.3%) were born to foreign-born mothers. Compared to the year 2015, this represents a significant decrease in children born to Portuguese-born mothers (71,462 or 83.6% in 2015) and, conversely, an increase in children born to foreign-born mothers (14,038 or 16.4%), despite the roughly similar overall number of live births (85,500 in 2015 and 87,764 in 2025).
Current vital statistics
View source data.
Structure of the population
Total fertility rate
By region
Source:
Intermunicipal community
Total fertility rate from 1850 to 1899
The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on fairly good data for the entire period. Sources: Our World In Data and Gapminder Foundation.
View source data.
Employment and income
- Unemployment, youth ages 15–24
- total: 21.8%. Country comparison to the world: 5th
- male: 21.2%
- female: 22.4% (2024 est.)
Urban organization
Maps
Metropolitan areas and agglomerations
As of 2025, Portugal had two significant agglomerations: the political metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto – Grande Área Metropolitana de Lisboa (3.4 million) and Grande Área Metropolitana do Porto (1.9 million). Together they host 45.65% of the total population.
Largest urban areas
When considering the number of inhabitants in consistent single urban areas, de facto cities in mainland Portugal, per the new with increased density of human-created structures, and excluding suburban and rural areas, Portugal has two cities with about one million inhabitants each (Lisbon and Porto), ten others with more than 50,000 inhabitants and 14 cities with populations between 20,000 and 40,000 inhabitants.
Largest cities
Portugal has 151 localities with national city status (cidade). Every city is included into a municipality (município). This is a list of population by city, which means that it refers to the number of inhabitants in the city proper, excluding inhabitants from the same municipality but living outside the urban area of the city in other civil parishes (freguesias) of the municipality. In some cases (e.g. Lisbon), the entire municipality and the city proper cover the same territory. Population numbers from the 2021 census.
Largest municipalities by population
The following table lists the largest Portuguese municipalities by population as of 2025. The land area is expressed in km2 and only municipalities with populations of over 100,000 inhabitants are listed. The 25 listed municipalities account for 46.09% of the country's population and for only 5.06% of its total land area.
People
Nationality
- noun: Portuguese (singular and plural)
- adjective: Portuguese
Immigration
In 1992, 1.3% of the population was foreign, and by 2025 the number had grown to 13.9% or 1,585,854 people.
Since the independence of the former African colonies, Portugal saw a steady immigration from Africa, most notably Cape Verde, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, but also São Tomé and Príncipe, Mozambique and former Portuguese India in Asia.
Portugal saw migration waves due to labor shortages since 1999, first from Eastern Europe (1999–2002), in two distinctive groups, a Slav (Ukraine, Russia and Bulgaria) and an East Latin (Romania and Moldova), that stopped and started declining as the labour market became saturated.
Since 2003, most of the immigrants came from Brazil, China and the Indian subcontinent. Family reunification was seen as important for a successful integration in the country, thus the government eased it, and in 2006, more than 6 in 10 new immigrants were family members of legal foreign residents in the country.
There is also a significant number of elderly Western European residents in search of quality of life, namely from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. More recently, there is significant migration from the former Portuguese colony of Brazil, as since 2017 more than 30,000 Brazilians immigrate to Portugal annually.
Below is a summary table of the main foreign nationalities present in Portugal according to the latest AIMA data. As of 31 December 2025, there were 1,585,854 legally resident people in Portugal with foreign citizenship (13.88% of the population). These include both citizens born in Portugal with foreign citizenship and foreign immigrants. Descendants of immigrants are excluded (Portugal, like many European countries, does not collect data on ethnicity) and those who, regardless of place of birth or citizenship at birth, were Portuguese citizens (see also Portuguese nationality law). Among the latter are also naturalized citizens whose data are reported in the next table.
Below is a summary table of Portuguese citizenship acquisitions by foreigners residing in the country recorded between 2008 and 2023 for countries having recorded at least 1,000 naturalizations during the given timespan. During this period, 359,378 people (3.34% of the current Portuguese population) obtained Portuguese citizenship according to the latest Eurostat data. These people are not counted among foreigners (see above table) as they are Portuguese citizens in all respects.
Net migration
Ethnic minorities and persons with disabilities
Portugal does not collect ethnicity or racial data of its population.
Anti-racism laws prohibit and penalize racial discrimination in housing, business, and health services.
Discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, education, access to health care, or the provision of other state services is illegal. The law mandates access to public buildings and to newly built private buildings for such persons.
Languages
The main language spoken as first language by the overwhelming majority of the population is Portuguese. Other autochthonous languages spoken include:
- Caló (see also Caló language), the language of the Portuguese-Romani community. There are about 52,000 Romani people in Portugal.
- Mirandês (see also Mirandese language), officially recognised as an official language. It enjoys special protection in the area of Miranda do Douro. As of today, there are about 15,000 people who speak the language (0.14%).
- Barranquenhu (see also Barranquenho), spoken in the town of Barrancos (in the border between Extremadura, Andalusia and Portugal). As of today, there are about 3,000 speakers of the language (0.03%).
- Minderico – a sociolect or argot spoken in Minde, practically extinct. There are about 150 speakers left
- Portuguese Sign Language, the official language for the deaf community in Portugal. There are about 30,000 deaf people (0.29%) in Portugal who use the language.
Religion
The great majority of the Portuguese population belongs to the Catholic Church. Religious observance remains strong in northern areas, while the population of Lisbon and southern areas are generally less devout.
Religious minorities include a little over 400,000 Protestants and Mormons (3.84% of the total population).
There are also about 100,000 Muslims (1%) and 45,000 Hindus (0.43%), most of whom came from Goa, a former Portuguese colony on the west coast of India (Some Muslims also came from former two Portuguese African colonies with important Muslim minorities: Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique).
There are also about 1,500 Jews, 2,000 Baha'i and 35,000 Sikhs (0.34%). Portugal is also home to about 17,000 Buddhists, mostly Chinese from Macau and a few Indians from Goa.
As of 2018, Portugal is one of the most religious countries in Europe; most Portuguese believe with certainty in the existence of God, and religion plays an important role in the life of most Portuguese. According to the Pew Research Center, 40% of Portuguese Catholics pray daily.
Religious map of Portuguese municipalities
Religion by municipality according with the 2021 Census.
Education
Literacy
definition: age 15 and over can read and write (2021 official INE estimate)
- total population: 96.92%
- male: 97.90%
- female: 96.04%
- School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
- total: 17 years
- male: 17 years
- female: 17 years (2020)