782,000 People Left Portugal in Five Years Under INE's New Count, More Than Twice the Old Estimate, and Nearly Half Were Foreign Nationals
Statistics Portugal's revised series, now built from administrative records, counts 782,248 people who left to live abroad from 2021 to 2025, peaking at 188,871 in 2024. Arrivals still outnumber departures, but the gap narrowed sharply in 2025.
More than 782,000 people left Portugal to live abroad for at least a year between 2021 and 2025, according to the revised annual emigration estimates of the Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE, Statistics Portugal). The figure is more than twice the ceiling of about 350,000 that the Observatório da Emigração (Emigration Observatory) had put on departures over the same period, and the gap comes mostly from a change in how the count is made.
The revision was reported on Thursday by Público and carried by ECO and Jornal de Negócios. The numbers below are taken directly from INE's permanent emigration series, last updated on 30 September.
The year-by-year count
INE counts as a permanent emigrant anyone who leaves to live in another country for a year or more. Under the new estimates:
- 2021: 120,806
- 2022: 128,536
- 2023: 164,087
- 2024: 188,871 (the peak)
- 2025: 179,948
Together they add up to 782,248. For comparison, INE's estimate for 2020, made under the old method, was 25,886.
Why the number jumped
From 2021 the estimates rest on administrative records, following the new population estimates for 2021 to 2025 that INE published on 22 June, which put the resident population at 11,424,031 at the end of 2025. INE's note on the series warns that the move from 2020 to 2021 has to be read with that break in mind. Until then, the figures came from a module of the Labour Force Survey, which asked households whether anyone had emigrated in the past year.
"It was more third parties' opinion about emigrants than facts," Rui Pena Pires, an Iscte sociologist and former head of the Observatório, told Negócios. Under that method INE had estimated 25,079 Portuguese emigrants for 2021, according to the paper; the revised series puts the figure at 67,754.
The second reason is coverage. The Observatório counts Portuguese citizens only, and its annual estimates of 60,000 to 70,000 are the basis of our August report on emigration. INE counts everyone who leaves, whatever their nationality.
Portuguese and foreign nationals
INE's breakdown by nationality shows 407,765 Portuguese citizens and 374,452 foreign nationals leaving over the five years. In 2025 foreign nationals were the majority for the second year running: 95,365 against 84,579 Portuguese. Of those foreign nationals, 80,678 held a non-EU nationality.
Pena Pires called the new method "much better", but told ECO he has doubts about how foreign departures are counted: a person dropping out of the records does not necessarily mean they went home or emigrated for good, and some may have left and come back irregularly.
Most of those leaving are young. In 2025, 89,246 of the 179,948 were aged 20 to 39, about half, and the largest single group was 25 to 29 (28,518). Men outnumbered women by 104,478 to 75,470.
Arrivals still outnumber departures
The same revised series shows immigration well ahead of emigration. INE estimates 1,829,662 permanent immigrants over 2021 to 2025, including 449,296 people with Portuguese nationality. Arrivals peaked at 495,979 in 2022 and fell to 254,253 in 2025, so the margin over departures narrowed sharply last year: about 74,000, against more than 367,000 in 2022.
The revision matters beyond the headline. The new population series is now INE's reference for every demographic indicator it publishes, and a recount of this kind can feed through to the life-expectancy figures that set Portugal's state pension age.
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