Who Gets the Profits
A third of what Portugal earns in production is operating surplus, the part that does not go to wages. Follow it through the national accounts and most of it never reaches a Portuguese household as income: it pays for worn-out machines, for corporate tax, and increasingly for owners abroad. Of the part that does reach households, about five-sixths goes to the richest tenth.
Earned and Unearned, the second part of the essay on the value of work, ended with an open question. The Portuguese household wealth survey showed that the richest tenth of households hold 84 per cent of the value of the businesses households own. The national accounts showed that 33 per cent of the income generated in production is operating surplus rather than wages or the income of the self-employed. Joining the two, it said, would show how much of that third reaches Portuguese households, and which ones.
This essay makes the join. It is simpler than it sounds, because the national accounts already record who pays property income to whom, sector by sector: firms, banks, the state, households and the rest of the world. What they do not record is which households. For that there are now two sources that did not exist a few years ago: the European Central Bank’s distributional wealth accounts, which scale the household survey to the national totals, and Eurostat’s experimental accounts that do the same for income. The answer uses all of them, and states where they disagree.
One correction first. The 84 per cent in the earlier essay refers to what the survey calls negócios por conta própria, businesses in which a household member works; passive stakes in unlisted firms are counted elsewhere, among “other financial assets”. The distributional accounts cover both, and give almost the same number: the richest tenth hold 83 per cent of business equity.[1][2]
Thirty-three points
Start with the whole. In 2025 Portugal’s factor income, what production paid to the people and capital that did it, before taxes on products, was €266 billion. Wages and employers’ contributions were 55.6 per cent of it; the mixed income of the self-employed, part labour and part capital, 11.4; and gross operating surplus 33.0.[3] Figure 1 follows the 33 points.
Six of them are not firms at all. The operating surplus of the household sector is mostly the rent that owner-occupiers are deemed to pay themselves, which the accounts count as income from a capital asset, the home. It is 6.2 points, and it is the most widely shared form of capital income there is, since seven in ten Portuguese households own their home.[2] Another 2.8 points belong to the state, and are essentially the depreciation of public buildings and roads.
The rest, 24.0 points, is the gross operating surplus of firms and banks. Almost half of it, 11.3 points, is depreciation: the machines, vehicles, buildings and software used up in the year, which have to be replaced before anyone can call the remainder profit. Corporate income tax takes 4.0 points. What remains, 8.7 points, is what firms have to pay to their lenders and owners, net of what they receive themselves, and to keep. Net interest is close to zero for the corporate sector as a whole, because banks receive about as much interest as other firms pay; and firms kept only about half a point as net saving. About 7.3 of the 8.7 points leave the corporate sector as distributed or reinvested profits, net of what firms receive from each other and from abroad.[3]
Profits paid out go to four kinds of recipient: other firms, which is mostly money moving within groups and is passed on again; the state; Portuguese households; and owners abroad. Following each euro to its final recipient outside the corporate sector, in 2025 non-residents received 5.1 points of factor income, in dividends and in the profits of foreign-owned subsidiaries reinvested on their behalf; Portuguese households received 3.7 points; the state, 0.4.[3] Nearly all of the households’ share is dividends proper: in 2023, the last year the accounts split it, withdrawals from the income of quasi-corporations were 1.6 per cent of it.[4]
So the first answer to the question in the earlier essay is: of the 33 points of operating surplus, about 6 reach Portuguese households as the imputed income of their homes, and about 3.7 reach them as distributed profits. The largest single destination of the corporate surplus is depreciation. And the owners abroad receive more than the owners at home.
The owners outside
That last fact is recent. Figure 2 shows the three final recipients since 1995. Portuguese households have received a roughly constant 3.4 to 5.4 points of factor income in dividends for thirty years, peaking in 2012 and 2013 and lower since. Owners abroad received 0.8 points in 1995. Their share rose through the 2000s, collapsed in 2011, when the reinvested earnings of foreign-owned firms turned negative, by €1.8 billion, as the crisis produced losses, and then rose again, passing the households for good in 2021. In 1995 non-residents received 15 per cent of the profits paid to final owners, households 78 per cent; in 2025 it was 55 and 40.[3]
The balance of payments tells the same story in euros. In 2025 foreign direct investors earned €12.2 billion on their Portuguese holdings, €7.8 billion paid as dividends and €4.4 billion reinvested; portfolio investors, who hold smaller stakes, received another €1.2 to 1.4 billion a year in dividends. The stock of foreign direct equity in Portugal rose from €124 billion in 2019 to €190 billion in 2025.[5] Of the listed shares issued by Portuguese non-financial firms, non-residents held 75 per cent at the end of 2025; Portuguese households held 6.[6]
Measured by control rather than by income, foreign-owned firms are 0.8 per cent of Portuguese enterprises but produce 29.3 per cent of the value added and 32.1 per cent of the gross operating surplus of the business economy, with 15.5 per cent of its employment. That is more than the EU average of 24 per cent, and more than in France, Germany or Spain, though far less than in the central European economies built on foreign factories, or in Ireland (Figure 3).[7] In the older series, which leaves out finance, the foreign-controlled share of value added rose from 19 per cent in 2008 to 27 per cent in 2020.[7] The privatisations required by the bailout of 2011 contributed: the electricity company, the national grid, the airports and the largest insurer were sold, in whole or in large part, to Chinese, French and other foreign buyers.
Two cautions keep this from being a simple story of profits leaving. The first is that some “foreign” owners are Portuguese in disguise: holding companies in the Netherlands and Luxembourg owned by Portuguese families count as non-residents, which inflates the foreign share of listed shares in particular.[6] The second is that the foreign firms brought something. They produce 29 per cent of the value added with 15.5 per cent of the workers, which means value added per worker almost twice the average; the capital came from abroad because Portugal, as the two-thirds country, did not have enough of its own. The dividends paid abroad are the price of that capital. Whether the price is fair is a different question from whether it is paid.
Which households
The 3.7 points that reach Portuguese households, about €9.9 billion in 2025, are the part the earlier essay asked about. Who gets them? The national accounts cannot say, and the tax returns, as the next section shows, see very little. The answer has to come from who owns the assets that pay dividends.
The European Central Bank’s distributional wealth accounts, published experimentally since 2024, take the household survey, add an estimate of the very rich that surveys miss, and scale every asset to the national financial accounts. For Portugal in early 2026 they put the richest tenth of households, by net wealth, at 59 per cent of all net wealth. But their share differs enormously by asset (Figure 4). They hold 40 per cent of net housing wealth and half of all deposits. They hold 83 per cent of business equity, the unlisted shares and stakes in which Portuguese dividends mostly originate, 91 per cent of listed shares and 93 per cent of investment funds. The poorer half of households hold between 0.6 and 1.7 per cent of each.[1]
If dividends follow business equity, the richest tenth receive about 3.1 of the 3.7 points, some €8 billion a year: among roughly 415,000 households, an average of about €20,000 each, though the average hides a further concentration at the very top. The next four-tenths receive about 0.6 points. The poorer half, about two million households, receive 0.06 points between them, some €170 million, or about €80 a household.[1][8]
The survey itself shows how thin ownership is. One household in six owns a business in which a member works, with a median value of €27,000; in the richest tenth by wealth it is almost one in two, with a median of €165,000. Fewer than one household in twelve holds any listed shares, funds or bonds.[2] Ranked by income rather than wealth, the result is similar. Eurostat’s experimental household accounts give the top tenth of households by income between 71 and 92 per cent of all property income received, interest included, in each year from 2019 to 2024, and the top fifth between 82 and 95 per cent; the OECD’s equivalent estimates for 2016 and 2017 give the top fifth 60 to 66 per cent.[9][10] The spread between years and sources is itself informative: the income survey on which these accounts rest captures only about a tenth of the property income in the national accounts, and the rest has to be distributed by assumption.[9]
Interest is the capital income that reaches further down. Households received €5.4 billion in interest in 2025, mostly on deposits, and deposits are the one financial asset the middle holds: the next four-tenths have 38 per cent of them, the poorer half 12.[1][3] But interest is mostly paid by banks out of the interest they charge on loans, including to households, which paid €1.7 billion; it is a transfer between savers and borrowers more than a share of firms’ profits.
What the returns do not see
It would be natural to check all this against income-tax statistics, as studies of top incomes do elsewhere. In Portugal it cannot be done. Dividends and interest paid by Portuguese entities are taxed at a flat 28 per cent withheld at source, and need not be declared. The tax authority’s statistics for 2024 record €768 million of capital income from the 113,441 taxpayers who chose to aggregate it with their other income, plus €290 million taxed at special rates; the authority itself notes that these figures “do not correspond to the global value” of capital income.[11] Against almost €10 billion of dividends in the national accounts, the returns see about a tenth. A recent survey of Portuguese inequality since 1974 concludes that “the distribution of wealth and capital income remain relatively obscure”.[12]
This matters for more than statistics. As Earned and Unearned showed, a euro of dividends pays 28 per cent at the shareholder, whatever the shareholder’s other income, while a euro of wages is taxed progressively and pays social contributions. A flat rate withheld at source is also a rate that leaves no record of who received what. The concentration measured above is an estimate because the state has chosen not to measure it directly.
What the join shows, and what it cannot
Put together, the path of the 33 points in 2025 is this. About 6 are the imputed income of owner-occupied homes, spread across the seven households in ten that own one. Almost 3 are the state’s own. Of the 24 generated by firms, 11 replace worn-out capital and 4 go in corporate tax. Of the profits that reach final owners, 5 points go abroad, 0.4 to the state and 3.7 to Portuguese households; and of those 3.7, about 3 go to the richest tenth by wealth. The richest tenth receive more in dividends than the whole of the other nine-tenths combined, several times over, and the owners abroad receive more than all Portuguese households.
The join has limits, and they point in different directions. It counts profits paid out, and the earnings reinvested on behalf of foreign investors, but not the earnings that Portuguese-owned firms keep, which raise the value of their owners’ shares; with net corporate saving at half a point of factor income, that omission is small in 2025, though not in every year. Households’ dividends include those from firms abroad, so the domestic share is somewhat smaller than shown. Many owners of small limited companies pay themselves a salary rather than dividends, which moves part of their capital income into wages; the reverse happens for tax reasons at the top. The allocation by wealth group rests on an experimental estimate that assigns all business equity by one key. And the survey’s own figures were revised in August 2026, after an error in the household weights; the conclusions did not change.[2]
What survives all of these is the order of magnitude. Operating surplus is a third of factor income, but the part of it that reaches Portuguese households as profits is about a ninth of that third, and most of the ninth goes to a tenth of the households. For everyone else, capital income means the home they live in and the interest on a deposit.
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 the numbers derived from the national accounts are computed by scripts/owners.py from Eurostat’s non-financial transactions by sector for Portugal (current prices, 1995–2025, downloaded 28 September 2026). The operating surplus of non-financial and financial corporations is not published separately in that table and is recovered from their balance of primary incomes; the sector totals match the published economy-wide figure to within 0.2 per cent. Distributional data come from the ECB Distributional Wealth Accounts, the revised ISFF 2024 annex, Eurostat’s and the OECD’s experimental distributional accounts, the tax authority’s IRS statistics and Eurostat’s foreign affiliates and balance-of-payments statistics. The allocation of households’ dividends to wealth groups is an assumption stated in the text. The downloaded sources, with a table reference for every number, are kept with the script’s data; results are in docs/owners-results.json and the figures in docs/owners-figures.html.
The cover photograph is Factory in Barreiro by Ricardo Liberato, the silos on the Tagus waterfront of the town that was once the seat of Portugal’s largest industrial group; CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.
Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer
- Earned and Unearned — the split of income between work and capital, who owns, and how each is taxed.
- The Duty to Work — how the centrality of work was instilled, and whose interests it serves.
- The Two-Thirds Country — Portugal’s productivity, hours and wages.
- Where the Hours Went — who got the income, what it bought, and where the hours of work go.
- European Central Bank, Distributional Wealth Accounts (experimental), Portugal, households by net wealth group, 2011-Q4 to 2026-Q1: net wealth, housing wealth, deposits, listed shares, unlisted shares and other equity, non-financial business wealth, investment fund shares; euro area for comparison. Retrieved 28 September 2026.
- Banco de Portugal & INE, Inquérito à Situação Financeira das Famílias 2024, press release, 28 May 2026, pp. 1–9; revised annex tables, August 2026, Tables A4–A8.
- Eurostat, Non-financial transactions (nasa_10_nf_tr), Portugal, sectors S1, S11, S12, S13, S14_S15 and S2, current prices, 1995–2025: D1, B2G, B3G, B5G, P51C, D4, D41, D42, D43, D5, B8G.
- Eurostat, nasa_10_nf_tr, Portugal, households’ distributed income of corporations received, D421 and D422, 2023.
- Eurostat, Balance of payments by country and partner (bop_c6_a), Portugal, direct and portfolio investment income, 2019–2025; international investment position, direct investment equity liabilities.
- ECB, Quarterly Sector Accounts and Securities Holdings Statistics by Sector, listed shares issued by Portuguese non-financial corporations, by holding sector, 2025-Q4.
- Eurostat, Foreign control of enterprises by economic activity and a selection of controlling countries (fats_activ), 2023, and fats_g1a_08, 2008–2020 (business economy excluding finance).
- INE, Censos 2021, private households.
- Eurostat, experimental statistics, Household distributional accounts: centralised data and metadata, Portugal, property income (D4) and mixed income by income decile, 2015–2024, with EU-SILC coverage rates.
- OECD Expert Group on Disparities in National Accounts, household income by quintile, Portugal, 2016 and 2017.
- Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, Dossier Estatístico IRS 2022–2024, November 2025, category E and special-rate income, and Notas prévias.
- Oliveira, “Income and wage inequality in democratic Portugal, 1974–2020”, Fiscal Studies 45(3), 2024, conclusion.
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