Key figures — as of 2026-08-09: National housing deficit accumulated since 2014 stands at roughly 300,000 units (Morningstar DBRS study, cited by APPII) — while the 2021 Census found 12% of all Portuguese dwellings, around 723,000 homes, sitting entirely vacant — municipalities formally identified just 12,803 vacant dwellings in 2023 — campaign group Devolutos estimates around 48,000 empty homes within the city of Lisbon alone.
A crisis with a hidden inventory
Portugal's housing shortage gets described the same way in almost every headline: not enough homes, too many people chasing them. The numbers back that up — since 2014, Portugal has accumulated a deficit of more than 300 thousand homes, when comparing the formation of new households with the number of completed houses, according to a Morningstar DBRS study reported by The Portugal News. Developers' association APPII has used the same figure in Parliament, warning that Portugal will have to triple its annual housing production, going from around 20,000 to at least 70,000 units per year by 2029.
What that framing leaves out is the other side of the ledger. Portugal isn't short of buildings — it's short of buildings people can actually move into. The OECD notes Portugal has the third-largest housing stock among the countries it surveyed, with 573.7 dwellings per 1,000 inhabitants, but ranks first for the share of homes that aren't primary residences — 12% entirely vacant and 19% used only as holiday homes. That January 2026 OECD Economic Survey is the most authoritative recent read on the paradox, and it's blunt about the scale: nationally, the vacant count works out to roughly 723,000 dwellings, more than double the entire 300,000-unit shortfall the country is trying to close.
Where the empty homes actually are
Vacancy isn't evenly spread, and that matters for anyone house-hunting. Many vacant properties are located in low-demand inland regions, while housing pressure remains concentrated in Lisbon, Porto and other coastal metropolitan areas. Even so, the capital has its own idle stock. Grassroots mapping project Devolutos — a grassroots civic tech platform that invites ordinary citizens to map visibly empty and abandoned buildings directly from the street — puts the figure at approximately 48,000 empty homes within Lisbon itself, drawn from census-linked estimates and municipal records. The project launched as a localized experiment in Lisbon and Porto before expanding its digital cartography to Coimbra, Évora, Braga, and Faro, and has drawn pushback from property-owner groups who call the public mapping an invasion of privacy.
The enforcement gap is the real story buried in the OECD's numbers. In 2023 municipalities had identified 12,803 vacant dwellings, yet census data from 2021 suggest a substantially larger number. Portugal has had the tools to close that gap since 2019 — Portugal allows using data from water and electricity consumption to identify vacant buildings — but the OECD says monitoring remains weak and recommends increasing property taxes or penalties on empty homes, especially in high-demand urban areas.
GrowIN's read on the numbers: if municipalities are only catching roughly 12,800 of an estimated 723,000 vacant homes nationally, official registers are seeing fewer than 2% of the actual idle stock — meaning any future vacancy tax or "use it or lose it" policy would be starting from a near-total blind spot on inventory.
What it means for foreign buyers and renters
None of this makes the shortage less real day-to-day. Prices in central Lisbon and the mortgage math still don't favour renters or first-time buyers, and the stock of residential properties on the market declined by 14 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, per idealista data. But the vacancy figures do complicate the simple "build more" narrative that dominates political debate. A meaningful share of the deficit could, in theory, be closed by activating homes that already exist rather than waiting years for new construction to clear licensing.
"Scarcity and idle stock are the same crisis viewed from opposite ends of the same street," is a fair way to put it — GrowIN Portugal Editorial.
For foreigners weighing where to buy, the practical takeaway is regional: inland districts with high vacancy may offer renovation opportunities and softer prices, while Lisbon and Porto remain tight regardless of how many nominally empty units sit uncounted. Anyone buying should still budget for the standard non-resident purchase costs — IMT transfer tax, stamp duty and notary fees — covered in our relocation guide, since none of that changes whether the specific property was previously vacant.
What to watch next
Whether Portugal moves from OECD recommendation to actual policy is the thing to track. A steeper empty-homes levy, better use of utility data to flag vacancy, or expansion of civic tools like Devolutos could all start converting idle stock into market supply over the next 12–24 months — though the OECD itself cautions that levies have a limited effect on reducing the number of vacant dwellings unless they are backed up by robust monitoring. Until enforcement catches up with the census data, the gap between "empty" and "available" will keep shaping what foreigners actually find on the market.