Banco de Portugal's 2025 Relatório e Contas — RAPI Deficit Collapses from -€1.142bn to -€304M, Gold Reserves Revalue 46%, Statutory Loss Held to €1.4M via a Provision Drawdown

The Banco de Portugal on Thursday, 23 April 2026, published its Relatório e Contas 2025 — and the headline is less about the number on the bottom line than about how that number came together. The central bank closed the year with a statutory net loss of €1.4 million, a microscopic figure by central-banking standards, but the path to it walked through a €304 million pre-provisions deficit, a 46% appreciation in the gold reserve, and a balance sheet that expanded by €20 billion to €211 billion.

The important line for anyone watching Portuguese finance is the one above the net loss. In 2024 the BdP's Resultado Antes de Provisões e Impostos (RAPI) came in at -€1.142 billion — the deepest structural hole the institution had run in years, driven by the mechanical cost of the European Central Bank's tightening cycle flowing through the eurosystem's monetary-policy book. One year later, that RAPI has collapsed to -€304 million. The bank still spent more on its monetary-policy liabilities than it earned on its monetary-policy assets, but the gap is now less than a third of what it was.

How €304 million of losses became €1.4 million

The €303-million bridge between the pre-provisions deficit and a roughly null pre-tax result came from a technical act the BdP has been preparing for years: using the stock of accumulated provisions — built during the years of ECB-induced paper profits — to absorb the current operating gap. On the BdP's summary, the RAPI was 'absorved by accumulated provisions from previous years, rendering the pre-tax result null.'

From there, a small net loss still appears because of two non-operating items that accountants will recognise but that most readers will not see in the headline: a reduction of deferred tax assets (the future tax shields the bank had capitalised on its balance sheet), and an autonomous-taxation charge. Those two lines together cut the number from nil to minus €1.4 million. That is why, in a year in which the structural operating gap was still -€304 million, the statutory loss reported on page one is a rounding error.

The comparison with 2024 is worth pinning down. That year the BdP delivered a net profit of €1.5 million — but only because the RAPI deficit (-€1.142 billion) was offset by an even bigger release of provisions. So one lens is: the bottom line has moved from +€1.5 million to -€1.4 million, a €2.9-million swing, which is statistically meaningless. A better lens: the underlying RAPI shortfall has improved by €838 million in twelve months. That is the real 2025 story.

Gold: the quiet 46% windfall

The second structural event inside the report is the gold reserve. Portugal is one of the richer holders of gold within the eurosystem — a legacy of accumulation that long predates Mario Centeno's governorship — and in 2025 the market price of gold ran away from everything around it. The Relatório e Contas records that the gold price appreciation booked by the BdP across 2025 came in at 46%.

That revaluation does not flow into the profit-and-loss account in the normal way. Under eurosystem accounting rules, unrealised gains on gold sit in a dedicated revaluation account on the liability side of the balance sheet — they do not inflate the headline result, but they do increase the bank's cushion against future shocks. The practical effect for Portugal is that the implicit equity buffer of the central bank has grown substantially even as the current-year operating result remained slightly negative.

It is also part of why the balance-sheet total climbed from about €191 billion at end-2024 to €211 billion at end-2025, an expansion of €20 billion that partly reflects gold revaluation, partly the ongoing mechanics of ECB-operations and TARGET2 balances, and partly BdP's own holdings of public debt maturing into a different rate environment.

Operating costs up 4.7%

The non-monetary-policy side of the bank is unambiguously more expensive to run than it was. Operating expenses reached €222 million in 2025 — an increase of 4.7% over 2024 — driven by staff costs, IT investment and the BdP's expanded supervisory mandate inside the Single Supervisory Mechanism. That 4.7% is materially above Portuguese CPI and above the ECB's own operating-cost trajectory, but consistent with the BdP's stated need to keep adding supervision and resolution capacity as Portugal's banking sector consolidates around fewer, larger institutions.

Against a €211-billion balance sheet the €222-million operating-cost line is, of course, small. But it is the only line on the P&L that the BdP directly controls — monetary-policy income depends on ECB decisions, gold on world prices, TARGET2 on cross-border flows. Operating expenses are the Governor's personal ledger, and they went up.

The Iran question that is not in the report

The Relatório e Contas 2025 is, by construction, a backward-looking document. It does not, on its own, project 2026. But the release date — 23 April 2026 — lands in the middle of a fast-moving oil shock triggered by the US-Iran confrontation and renewed threats to freedom of passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Crude rose roughly 3% on the day of the BdP's release, extending a two-week rally that has already pushed Euribor up for the first time since January 2024 — a movement we covered separately in Portugal's Average Mortgage Rate Nudges Up for the First Time Since January 2024.

For the BdP, the Iran-strait turbulence matters through three distinct transmission lines. First, any sustained rise in oil and therefore in eurozone inflation expectations will push the ECB to hold rates higher for longer — which, mechanically, keeps the bank's monetary-policy liabilities expensive and the RAPI deficit wider than it would otherwise be. Second, gold typically rises further in a geopolitical risk cycle, which would add another year of revaluation gains to the reserve account — a positive, but a paper one. Third, any Middle-East-driven financial-stability episode — a sovereign under stress, a counterparty under stress — runs through the BdP as the Portuguese resolution authority. Prime Minister Luís Montenegro said on Thursday, through ECO, that he did not expect Iran-related disruptions to hit Portuguese tourism in the coming months. The central bank's silence on the same question is its own kind of commentary.

What it means for the Portuguese banking sector

For a reader of this briefing, the three lines to take away are operational, not accounting.

First, Portugal's central bank is structurally recapitalised, but only just. The improvement from -€1.142 billion to -€304 million in RAPI over twelve months is not small — it is almost the full year-on-year impact of the ECB's cutting cycle flowing through the balance sheet. If the ECB continues cutting through 2026, 2027 closes the loop and BdP returns to a genuine pre-provisions profit. If the ECB stops cutting — the Iran-Ormuz scenario — that return is delayed, possibly beyond 2027. The provisions buffer is not infinite.

Second, the gold reserve is doing the stabilising work that the loan book cannot. A 46% revaluation on a multi-billion-euro holding is the single biggest line item in this report, even though it does not appear on the P&L. It is the reason the BdP's balance sheet has continued to expand even as operating results have deteriorated.

Third, the supervisory cost line is now growing faster than anything else the bank does. With Novo Banco about to pass to BPCE, with the CTT-Bankinter dance continuing, and with consolidation pressure across smaller deposit-takers, the BdP's 4.7% operating-cost rise is likely to persist — which means the institution's ability to self-finance through non-monetary-policy income will matter more in each of the next three reports than it did in this one.

The report in one paragraph

Strip the accounting and 2025 reads like this: the BdP's structural losses on monetary-policy operations shrank by €838 million in a year; the gold in its vaults gained almost half its value; the supervisory bill grew by about 5%; the balance sheet expanded by €20 billion to €211 billion; and the statutory loss was kept to €1.4 million by drawing down accumulated provisions and absorbing small deferred-tax and autonomous-tax charges. The report is not a confession of weakness — it is the last year of a tightening cycle being closed off. Whether 2026 is the first year of a real recovery depends less on Rua do Comércio than on what happens in the Strait of Hormuz. On the housing-credit policy tape, our read on the under-35 public housing guarantee — 32,338 contracts, €905M drawn, and the 31 December 2026 cliff against the BdP macroprudential brake sets the latest reference. On the Brussels macro-forecast tape, our preview of the European Commission Spring 2026 Forecast for Portugal — landing 21 May with revisions across GDP, deficit, inflation and debt sets the latest reference. For foreign residents on the Portuguese-banking documentary chain, our 2026 guide to opening a Portuguese bank account — the NIF prerequisite, the Lei 83/2017 AML documentary chain, the CGD vs Millennium vs Santander vs BPI vs Novobanco vs Bankinter matrix, the ActivoBank and BiG digital tracks, and the Conta-Base / Serviços Mínimos Bancários free-account backstop sets the latest reference. On the banking-supervision side, our read on the Banco de Portugal Folheto de Comissões reformulation (multi-year programme through 2028, Comparador de Comissões expansion, €8.91M undue commissions refunded in 2025) sets the latest reference. On the Portuguese payments-infrastructure and conduct-of-business tape, our read on SIBS-FPS's 13 May 2026 withdrawal of its sixteen-month-old TACL administrative action against the Banco de Portugal on the EU 751/2015 scheme-vs-processor separation file sets the latest reference. For how the SIBS Multibanco and MB Way rails actually work in 2026, our 2026 MB Way and Multibanco guide — the SIBS-operated domestic card rails, the 11,000-plus ATM network, the Entidade-Referência-Montante bill-payment substrate that carries IRS, IVA, IUC and utility settlements, the €750-per-transaction MB Way P2P caps and the MB Spot agent-based cash-in/cash-out service for freguesias without a bank branch sets the latest reference. On the rural cash-access and Multibanco Social rail, our 21 May Multibanco Social read — the SIBS pilot installing cash machines inside roughly twenty juntas de freguesia in the cash-desert interior, the 1,200+ parishes without any physical cash-out point, the seventeen-kilometre worst-case walk to an ATM, Banco de Portugal governor Álvaro Santos Pereira aligned on the rollout, and the cash-in-shop and mobile-branch tracks running alongside sets the latest reference. On the Presidential storm-response oversight side, our 23 May read on the Seguro Open-Presidency storm-response critique — the ~100-page report from the 6-10 April Centro tour faulting Government coordination, clarity and interoperability, calling for accelerated aid, hardened telecoms-and-energy redundancy and a pre-summer territorial readiness audit ahead of the fire season sets the latest reference. On the digital-fraud and payments-safety side, our 25 May read on the Banco de Portugal launch of the Plataforma de Monitorização da Fraude Digital with SIBS, telecoms and the PJ — €6.5 million of losses blocked since the May 2024 IBAN-beneficiary tool, 2,577 fraud-related complaints in 2025 (+45% YoY), and 85% of fraudulent-transfer losses currently borne by the user the platform is designed to compress back to the institutional layer sets the latest reference. On the bank-executive-compensation side, our 26 May read on BCP's 25 May share distribution — 4,087,904 own shares moved to the executive committee at €0.9616 for a €3.93 million headline, Miguel Maya's 871,156-share envelope worth €837,700, Maria José Campos, Miguel de Bragança and João Nuno Palma in the table, settling 2020-2024 deferred variable pay and the 2022-2025 long-term plan sets the latest reference. On the CGD, Paulo Macedo, Portuguese State-owned banking, dividend-distribution and capital-structure side of the file, our 19 June read on Paulo Macedo's CGD delivering a €1.25 billion dividend cheque to the Portuguese State on 26 June — €952.2 million from the €1.98 billion 2025 profit, €297.8 million from reserves and a parallel capital lift from €4.525 billion to €6 billion sets the latest reference.