Key figures — as of 2026-09-15: Foreigners' share of family-home purchases fell to 27.6% in 2025 — the lowest since 2021 (INE) — as buyers with tax residence abroad fell 13.3% to 8,471 homes, the third straight annual drop; national house prices rose 17.6% over 2025, the sharpest annual increase since INE's index began; early-2026 data confirms the split: House Price Index up 17.8% year-on-year in Q1, non-resident transactions down 15.6% to 1,770 homes.
A shrinking slice of a record-hot market
Portugal's property market just posted two numbers that don't usually move in opposite directions. According to figures from Statistics Portugal (INE) released in March 2026, the weight of property acquisitions by foreigners, of homes for families, fell to 27.6% in 2025, the lowest percentage since 2021. Over the same year, the national House Price Index posted its steepest climb on record.
The retreat isn't about foreigners disappearing from Portugal altogether — plenty are still buying, just fewer of them relative to the overall market, and increasingly they're not the ones setting the pace. Foreign buyers acquired 41,086 homes in Portugal in 2025, 6.6% more than in 2024, but that headline number was almost entirely a domestic-tax-residence story: 34,834 of those purchases came from foreigners already registered as tax resident in Portugal (up 11.4%), while purchases by buyers without Portuguese tax domicile fell 14.1%. Strip out foreigners who already live here and the genuinely non-resident buyer — the classic overseas investor or lifestyle purchaser — is the one pulling back.
idealista's read of the same INE dataset puts a sharper number on it: in 2025, buyers with tax residence outside Portugal purchased 8,471 homes, a 13.3% decrease compared to 2024, marking the third consecutive annual drop in transactions involving non-residents. EU-resident buyers weren't spared either — EU-resident buyers acquired 4,416 dwellings in 2025, down 9.6% year-on-year, while buyers resident in non-EU countries purchased 4,055 dwellings, down 17.1%.
Priced out, or pricing themselves out?
Meanwhile the market they're stepping back from just got more expensive than ever. For 2025 as a whole, Portugal's House Price Index increased by 17.6%, the strongest annual rise in the available series. That trend hasn't broken in 2026: Eurostat data shows the largest increases in house prices across the EU were recorded in Portugal (+10.3%), Bulgaria (+9.4%) and Slovakia (+9.1%) when comparing Q1 2026 with the 2025 average, and INE's own quarterly index recorded a 17.8% annual rise in Q1 2026.
The domestic side of the market absorbed nearly all the growth. Buyers with tax residence in Portugal purchased 161,341 dwellings in 2025, up 10.1% year-on-year, the highest share since the series began in 2019, helped along by more favourable financing conditions and government measures for younger buyers — a scheme the Finance Minister said had helped more than 70,000 applicants and around 23,000 public-guarantee users. Whether non-residents are being squeezed out by cost, or are simply choosing to sit out a market this frothy, is genuinely hard to separate — both forces are pulling in the same direction.
GrowIN analysis: what the acceleration costs in real terms
Here's the number that matters for anyone actually shopping: at Q1 2026's median transaction price of €2,337/m² against 19.8% year-on-year growth, the same square metre cost roughly €1,951 a year earlier. On a typical 100m² apartment, that's an extra €38,600 in twelve months — money a buyer loses simply by waiting, before even factoring in the non-resident premium. And that premium is real: INE's 2025 data shows non-resident buyers already pay far more for what they get — buyers with tax domicile in Portugal bought at an average of €234,120, EU buyers paid an average of €335,640, and buyers from other countries spent an average of €470,277. Non-EU buyers, in other words, are now paying roughly double what a Portuguese-resident buyer pays for the average home.
"Foreigners aren't vanishing from Portugal's property market — they're becoming a smaller, pricier footnote to a market that's now running almost entirely on domestic money," notes GrowIN Portugal Editorial.
What this means and what to watch
For foreigners still planning a purchase, the practical takeaway is that competition now comes mainly from Portuguese buyers backed by state guarantees, not just other overseas investors — which changes the negotiating dynamic in mid-market segments. Anyone buying without Portuguese tax residence should budget for the full non-resident cost stack and start the paperwork — NIF, bank account, fiscal representation where required — well before house-hunting; our relocation hub walks through the sequencing. Watch INE's next quarterly release for whether the non-resident decline that hit 15.6% in early 2026 deepens further, and whether Golden Visa's narrower post-real-estate options do anything to reverse the trend among wealthier buyers.
For now, the data tells a consistent story: Portugal's housing boom no longer needs foreign money to keep breaking records, and the buyers most exposed to that boom are increasingly Portuguese.