Caixa Geral de Depósitos Closes Q1 2026 With €397 Million in Profit and 213 Fewer Workers — 24%-Plus Mortgage Share, NPLs at 1.38% and CET1 Above 21% as the State Bank Marks Its 150th Anniversary

Caixa Geral de Depósitos closed the first quarter of 2026 with a consolidated net profit of €397 million, up 1% on the same period in 2025, and a Portuguese headcount that was 213 lower at the end of March than twelve months earlier. The state bank — Portugal's only majority-public commercial lender, fully owned by the Treasury — published the numbers on 8 May 2026 as the institution marks its 150th anniversary. The Q1 release sits inside the broader system tape, where Portugal's five biggest banks together booked €1.279 billion in profit in the same window, up 4.9%. Read against that comparator, CGD's headline number sits in the bottom half of the cohort on growth, while its balance-sheet metrics — credit, deposits, and capital — keep the bank firmly anchored as the largest single lender in the country.

The Q1 2026 Numbers in Detail

The €397 million bottom line was achieved against a backdrop of a softer rate environment, with the bank's financial margin (net interest income) coming in at €616 million, down 3.1% year-on-year as the ECB rate cycle continued to feed through into Portuguese mortgage repricing. Total customer resources reached €104.3 billion at the end of March, of which €79 billion sat on balance sheet as customer deposits and €25.3 billion in off-balance-sheet products including investment funds, insurance products and other managed savings.

On the asset side, total credit to clients stood at €53.3 billion, a 9% year-on-year increase. The growth was driven almost entirely by the housing book: residential mortgage credit climbed to €29 billion, up 10% on March 2025, and the bank's overall market share in retail credit reached 18%, with the mortgage segment alone above 24% — meaning roughly one in every four euros of new and outstanding home loans in Portugal sits on Caixa's balance sheet. Asset quality remained strong, with the non-performing loan ratio at 1.38% and the absolute NPL stock below €1 billion, which the bank's release describes as below both the Portuguese and the European averages.

On capital, CGD reported a CET1 ratio above 21% on a fully-loaded, post-dividend basis. The figure incorporates the €1.25 billion dividend announced in February 2026 to be paid to the Portuguese state on 2025 results — the largest single annual distribution in the bank's history. Cumulatively, since the 2017 recapitalisation that wrapped up Caixa's post-financial-crisis cleanup, the bank has generated €8.3 billion in own capital, of which €4.9 billion has been retained and €3.4 billion has been paid out to the Treasury in dividends.

The 213-Worker Reduction

The Q1 2026 release recorded that CGD's Portuguese workforce stood 213 lower at the end of March 2026 than at the end of March 2025. The number is the net headcount change, after new hires; the gross outflow over the twelve months — voluntary departures, retirements, mutual-termination agreements and standard attrition — is therefore higher. CGD has been on a quiet, multi-year glide path of staff reduction since the 2017 recapitalisation, when the bank closed roughly a fifth of its branch network and used a combination of pre-retirement schemes and mutual-termination programmes to bring its cost base into line with European averages. The latest 213 figure is consistent with that trajectory rather than a step-change.

The reduction is also a useful reminder of why CGD's cost-income picture has been one of the more defensible across the Portuguese system. The big-five aggregate profit grew 4.9% in the same window; CGD's 1% number is mechanically anchored by the lower margin, which makes a tighter cost base load-bearing for the headline. Against the cohort, BCP's 25.6% Q1 jump and BPI's strong number — both reported in the days before the CGD release — set a bar that pure interest-margin compounding can no longer match for the state bank.

Macedo on Housing Supply

The Q1 release came alongside a separate intervention by chief executive Paulo Macedo, who used the earnings cycle to flag that he is, in his own framing, 'much more concerned' about the supply of housing in Portugal than about the public guarantee programme that backstops young first-time buyers. The position lines up with what the credit numbers show: the bank's mortgage book is growing in double digits at a moment when Portuguese transaction prices and rents continue to outrun wage growth, and CGD's risk indicators are telling Macedo that the constraint is on the inventory side, not on the underwriting side. The chief executive flagged that the state bank stands ready to keep lending to younger borrowers if supply-side measures are not adopted, but that the marginal extra credit will not, by itself, fix the structural shortfall.

That position is consequential. Caixa is by some distance the largest single mortgage originator in the country; the public-bank chief executive saying out loud that the binding constraint is housing stock, not credit, sits alongside the recently approved nationality and labour-reform debates as another piece of the supply-side conversation. It also reframes the public guarantee scheme — which we have covered in earlier pieces — as a demand-side bridge rather than the corrective.

The 150-Year Mark

Caixa Geral de Depósitos was founded on 10 April 1876 as the savings vehicle of the Portuguese state, originally housed inside the General Treasury of the Kingdom. Over the following century and a half, it absorbed Crédito Predial Português, the postal savings bank, and a constellation of municipal savings banks; survived the post-1974 nationalisations as a public bank rather than as a re-privatised institution; expanded into Africa and Brazil in the 1990s and early 2000s; and rode out the 2010-2014 sovereign-debt crisis with the largest single state recapitalisation in Portuguese banking history. The 2017 capital injection — €5.075 billion in total, partly funded by the Treasury and partly by tier-2 instruments — was carried out under EU competition clearance and committed CGD to a turnaround plan that has now produced eight consecutive years of growing dividends back to the shareholder.

The 150th anniversary lands at a politically sensitive moment for the bank's structural future. There is no current proposal to privatise CGD; the AD government's programme keeps the institution in public hands. But the European Commission has signalled, in the periodic monitoring of the 2017 state-aid clearance, that questions about the long-term ownership model will return to the table later in this decade, particularly if dividends keep flowing back to a Treasury that no longer needs the recapitalisation safety net. For Q1 2026, however, the message is more boring and more useful: the largest mortgage lender in the country is profitable, well-capitalised, has a non-performing book below 1.4%, and is shrinking its workforce at the kind of measured pace that does not threaten retail service quality.

What This Means for Expats

• Mortgage availability: CGD remains the single largest mortgage lender in Portugal with more than 24% of the market. If you are house-hunting in 2026 and shopping for a home loan, Caixa will almost certainly be one of the three offers you compare. The Q1 release shows the housing book growing at 10% — the bank is open for business on residential lending.
• Pricing: The 3.1% drop in CGD's net interest margin is the system reading on ECB rate cuts. New variable-rate mortgages and refinances are, on average, cheaper than they were twelve months ago. Expect the spread on the next round of fixed-rate offers to compress as the cycle finishes feeding through.
• Deposits: €79 billion of customer deposits at the largest state-backed bank is one of the simpler answers to the 'where do I park my euros' question for new arrivals. Branch-based and online onboarding remain available; identification requirements (NIF, passport, comprovativo de morada) are unchanged.
• Branch network: A 213-worker net reduction over the year does not, by itself, translate into branch closures, and CGD has not announced new closures alongside the Q1 release. Smaller-municipality branches continue to be the most exposed to digital-first restructuring.
• Public-guarantee mortgages: CGD continues to participate in the public guarantee scheme for first-time buyers under 35. Macedo's comments do not change the bank's posture on the programme — they reframe it as a demand-side supplement rather than a structural fix.

The next milestone for the institution is the full half-year report, expected in late July or early August, which will show whether the second-quarter NIM compression continues and whether the housing book keeps growing at double digits as the rate cycle bottoms. The other watchpoint is the European Commission's periodic state-aid monitoring report, due in the autumn, which will be the next formal moment at which CGD's long-term ownership model is publicly discussed.