The Arrivals

Essay · society · September 2026

In ten years the number of foreign residents in Portugal roughly quadrupled, to about one in seven. They are young, they work at the same rate as the Portuguese, and they pay far more into Social Security than they take out, for now. They are also paid less, more often poor and more often in jobs below their qualifications. What their arrival does to wages, housing and pensions depends on questions the data can partly answer.

Reading time ≈ 8 min How many → what they pay → work → pensions

The question

Immigration has run through this series without an essay of its own. The Treadmill found that all of Portugal’s population growth since 2013 came from migration. The Bidders found that new households, most of them formed by migrants, were the largest source of demand for homes. A third of construction workers are now foreign, and a quarter of births are to foreign mothers. This essay sets out what the numbers say about the people who have arrived: how many, how old, what they contribute and receive, how they fare at work, and what their arrival means for the pension system.

~1.5mforeign residents at the end of 2024, on the migration agency’s count; about 0.37 million in 2015

€4.1bnSocial Security contributions declared for foreign workers in 2025, against €0.8bn of benefits paid to foreigners

47%of foreign graduates in work are in jobs below their qualifications; 14% of Portuguese graduates

72 vs 62people aged 65+ per 100 of working age in 2070, with no migration and in the baseline projection

How many

A fourfold rise, hard to count

After falling during the crisis, the number of foreign citizens living in Portugal began to rise in 2017 and then accelerated. The official population estimates counted about 367,000 in 2015 and 1.05 million at the start of 2024 (Figure 1). The migration agency, AIMA, counted 1.54 million at the end of 2024, including about 286,000 people whose regularisation had been accepted but not completed.[1][2] Counting has been difficult: AIMA revised its own figure for 2023 up by about 250,000, and INE’s revision of the population estimates in 2026, the first built from administrative records, is reported to put the population at 11.4 million at the end of 2025, with about 1.6 million foreign citizens, 14 per cent.[3]

Fig. 1 — Residents of Portugal with foreign citizenship, and residents born abroad (from 2012, after a series break), on 1 January, 2010–2024, from the population estimates before INE’s 2026 revision; dot: valid residence titles and pending regularisations counted by AIMA at 31 December 2024. The born-abroad series includes many Portuguese citizens born in the former colonies and elsewhere. Data: Eurostat, migr_pop1ctz and migr_pop3ctb; AIMA, Relatório de Migrações e Asilo 2024, pp. 2–3.

The origins changed with the numbers. Brazilians are by far the largest group, about 356,000 on the official estimates in 2024 and 31 per cent of AIMA’s count; Ukrainians, Angolans, British and Cape Verdeans follow. The fastest growth has come from South Asia: Indians went from about 5,000 in 2013 to 43,000 in 2024, and India is now the second nationality on AIMA’s register; Nepalese and Bangladeshis grew similarly.[1][2] Seven in ten live in the districts of Lisbon, Setúbal, Porto and Faro.[2]

How old

A young population in an old country

The most important fact about the new residents, for the public accounts, is their age. Two-thirds of foreign citizens are aged 20 to 49, against a third of Portuguese citizens; 8 per cent are 65 or over, against 26 per cent (Figure 2).[1] They arrive at working age, after another country has paid for their childhood and schooling, and most of them will not draw a pension for decades.

Fig. 2 — Residents of Portugal by age group, per cent of each citizenship group, 1 January 2024. Data: Eurostat, migr_pop1ctz; author’s calculation.

What they pay

The Social Security account

The Public Finance Council has published what Social Security receives from and pays to foreign nationals. Contributions declared for foreign workers rose from €0.5 billion in 2015 to €4.1 billion in 2025; the social benefits paid to foreign nationals, contributory and non-contributory, rose from €0.13 billion to €0.8 billion (Figure 3). In 2025 foreign nationals were 20 per cent of all contributors, and they accounted for almost all of the growth: in 2024 the number of foreign contributors rose by 144,000 and the number of Portuguese contributors by 9,000.[4] The Council notes that without foreign workers the contributor base “would have practically stabilised”.

Fig. 3 — Social Security contributions declared for workers of foreign nationality, and social benefits (contributory and non-contributory, excluding pensions) paid to foreign nationals, billion euros, 2015–2025. Data: Conselho das Finanças Públicas, Evolução Orçamental da Segurança Social e da CGA em 2025, Relatório 04/2026, box 1.1.1 and data file (Quadro 6).

This is not a full fiscal balance, and the Council says so. It leaves out pensions, which foreign workers will draw later, and the balance “may narrow” as their careers lengthen; it also leaves out health, education and taxes. The fullest comparison available, by the OECD for 2006–2018, before the recent surge, counted all taxes and all spending. It found that the foreign-born in Portugal contributed a net 0.9 per cent of GDP a year, the third highest of 25 countries, and that per person they cost the State about three-quarters as much as the native-born, largely because they are younger: two-fifths as much in pensions, half as much in education.[5] That study counts as foreign-born the many Portuguese born in the former colonies, and it cannot tell how the recent, poorer and larger inflows will balance over a lifetime.

Work and pay

Working as much, paid less

Foreign citizens aged 20 to 64 are employed at the same rate as the Portuguese, about 80 per cent in 2025, but their unemployment rate is higher, 10 per cent against 6 (Figure 4). Their jobs are worse than their qualifications: 47 per cent of employed foreign graduates work in jobs that do not need a degree, against 14 per cent of Portuguese graduates. And 18 per cent of foreign workers live in poor households, against 8 per cent of Portuguese; the median income of foreign citizens is about three-quarters of that of Portuguese citizens.[6]

Fig. 4 — Foreign and Portuguese citizens in Portugal, 2025: employment and unemployment rates (ages 20–64), over-qualification rate (employed with tertiary education in jobs of lower skill level) and in-work at-risk-of-poverty rate (employed, 18–64). Data: Eurostat, Labour Force Survey and EU-SILC by citizenship.

The OECD finds that immigrants entering the Portuguese labour market earn about 28 per cent less than natives of the same age and sex, one of the smaller gaps among fifteen countries, and that about half of it is explained by the sectors they enter: 57 per cent start in low-wage sectors such as hotels and restaurants, administrative services and construction.[7] Among employees, the pay gap in the same broad skill level was small before the surge, about 4 per cent in the lower tiers in 2021.[8]

Effects

On wages, and on homes

Whether immigration lowers the wages of the Portuguese depends on who competes with whom. A study of Portuguese payroll data for 2010–2019 finds that when immigrants are grouped with natives in the same occupation and experience, a 1 per cent rise in their share goes with native wages 0.4 to 0.6 per cent higher, as immigrants take complementary tasks; grouped by education instead, the effect is negative, and natives in low-skill occupations lose.[9] A meta-analysis of 88 studies from many countries puts the average effect on native wages close to zero, with wide variation.[10] Both predate the recent surge, which was larger and faster than anything in those studies.

The effect on housing is clearer. As The Bidders showed, new households formed by migrants were the largest single source of demand for homes in a country that was building a fraction of what it once did; between 2021 and 2024, migration added about 52,000 households a year.[11] Immigrants also build the homes: about a third of construction employees are now foreign. The pressure on housing is the most direct cost that immigration has placed on residents, and it falls on renters, including the immigrants themselves.

Pensions

What the projections assumed

The long-term projections show how much the pension system depends on migration. In Eurostat’s 2023 projections, Portugal would have 62 people aged 65 and over for every 100 of working age in 2070; with lower migration, 65; with none, 72 (Figure 5). The European Commission’s Ageing Report finds that a third less migration raises pension spending by about 0.5 points of GDP around 2050.[12][13] The Portuguese Green Book on Social Security, using the same models, projects the system’s reserve fund at 28 per cent of GDP in 2070 with higher migration and 9 per cent with lower.[14]

Fig. 5 — Portugal: population aged 65 and over per 100 aged 15–64 in 2070, under Eurostat’s 2023 baseline projection and its higher-, lower- and no-migration variants. Data: Eurostat, EUROPOP2023 (proj_23ndbi).

Those projections assumed net migration of about 16,000 people a year in the late 2020s. Actual net migration was between about 200,000 and 370,000 a year in 2022–2024, on figures partly affected by statistical revisions, and about 70,000 in 2025.[1][3] The next round of projections will start from a population that is younger, and larger, than the last one assumed. Whether that improves the long-run balance depends on how long the arrivals stay, how much they earn, and whether their pensions, decades from now, are matched by the contributions of those who come after them. Immigration postpones the ageing of the population; it does not stop it, because immigrants grow old too.

The balance

What the numbers say

On the evidence available, the recent arrivals have been, so far, a large net contributor to Social Security, a young workforce in an ageing country, and the reason that employment, contributions and births have grown. They have also been a large source of demand for housing in a country that stopped building, and they work in worse jobs, for lower pay and with more poverty than the Portuguese, often below their qualifications. Their effect on the wages of the Portuguese is, on the best evidence, small and mixed.

Public opinion, before the surge, was among the most favourable in Europe: in 2018 the Portuguese rated immigration’s effect on the economy at 6.3 out of 10, the highest of the countries surveyed.[15] Much has happened since. The questions that will decide how the balance looks in twenty years are ones the data cannot yet answer: whether the newcomers move up into jobs that match their qualifications, whether they stay, and whether Portugal builds the homes, schools and services that a population a million larger needs.

On method and tools

This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification, editorial direction and critical review; machine data research, analysis and drafting. The figures and derived numbers are computed by scripts/immigration.py. Population by citizenship uses Eurostat’s series before INE’s 2026 revision, which INE’s website did not let us download; the revised totals are quoted from press reports and should be checked. The Social Security figures are contributions declared by employers and benefits excluding pensions; they are not a fiscal balance. The OECD fiscal estimate covers 2006–2018 and counts the foreign-born, not foreign citizens. Pay data by nationality end in 2021. Results are in docs/immigration-results.json and the figures in docs/immigration-figures.html; the downloaded sources, with a table or page reference for every number, are kept with the script’s data.

The cover photograph is Lisboa, Rua da Mouraria by Jorge Franganillo; CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer

Related essays on this blog

1. The Bidders — who pushed house prices up, including migration.
2. The Treadmill — why jobs, debts and pensions depend on growth.
3. The Sustainability Story — the Portuguese pension system and its forecasts.
4. Fewer Than Wanted — Portugal’s low fertility and the children people want.

Sources

1. Eurostat, population on 1 January by citizenship and age (migr_pop1ctz) and by country of birth (migr_pop3ctb), Portugal, 2010–2024 (series before INE’s 2026 revision); net migration (demo_gind); author’s calculation of age shares.
2. AIMA, Relatório de Migrações e Asilo 2024, pp. 2–8.
3. Observatório das Migrações, Indicadores Migratórios em Portugal: Análise Comparativa AIMA vs INE, September 2025, pp. 3–4; INE population estimates of June 2026, as reported by Jornal de Negócios and RTP, 22 June 2026 (not checked against INE).
4. Conselho das Finanças Públicas, Evolução Orçamental da Segurança Social e da CGA em 2025, Relatório 04/2026, 28 May 2026, box 1.1.1 (pp. 9–14) and data file.
5. OECD, International Migration Outlook 2021, chapter 4, Tables 4.1, 4.3 and 4.4.
6. Eurostat, Labour Force Survey by citizenship (employment, unemployment and over-qualification rates) and EU-SILC by citizenship (in-work poverty, median equivalised income), Portugal, 2025.
7. OECD, International Migration Outlook 2025, chapter 4 (immigrant earnings gaps) and Portugal country note.
8. Observatório das Migrações, Indicadores de Integração de Imigrantes: Relatório Estatístico Anual 2023, p. 161 (Quadros de Pessoal 2021).
9. M. Ghasemi, P. Teixeira and C. Carreira, “Immigrants and the Portuguese Labor Market: Threat or Advantage?”, IZA Discussion Paper 17266, 2024, abstract and p. 17.
10. C. Nedoncelle, L. Marchal, A. Aubry and J. Héricourt, meta-analysis of the effect of immigration on native wages, CEPII Working Paper 2025-07, p. 1.
11. Banco de Portugal, Boletim Económico, December 2025, D. Costa, C. Santos and R. Soares, pp. 40–42 (printed).
12. Eurostat, EUROPOP2023 population projections for Portugal (proj_23ndbi): baseline and migration variants.
13. European Commission, 2024 Ageing Report, Portugal country fiche, pp. 48–49 and Table 30.
14. Comissão para a Sustentabilidade da Segurança Social, Livro Verde, 2024 (edition of January 2025), Annex C.
15. European Social Survey 2018, as reported in Observatório das Migrações, Indicadores de Integração de Imigrantes 2023, pp. 146–147.