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.