Crédito à Habitação Climbs to €115 Billion at April Close — 10.7% Year-on-Year Print Is the Fastest Mortgage-Stock Lift Since February 2003 as the Garantia Pública Jovens 100% LTV Window Powers the Acceleration

The Banco de Portugal released the April 2026 monetary-and-financial statistics on Monday 1 June, and the headline number on the household side reset the entire post-crisis reading of the Portuguese mortgage book. The stock of credit for house purchase reached €115 billion, up 10.7% year-on-year — a pace the supervisor has not printed since February 2003, two years before the country's post-Euro housing cycle peaked and almost a full generation before today's 35-year-old first-time buyers were old enough to take out a loan.

The April reading slots in above March's 9.8% and February's 8.9%, locking in a clear three-month acceleration rather than a single-month spike. It also lands in the same week that the BdP's May 2026 Financial Stability Report flagged a residential real estate correction as the main internal risk to the system — a juxtaposition the central bank acknowledged directly in the data release.

The Garantia Pública Jovens Mechanic

The driver is no longer ambiguous. The Garantia Pública Jovens scheme — the state-backed instrument that lets first-time buyers under 35 obtain a 100% loan-to-value mortgage on a primary residence — has shifted the demographic mix of new lending faster than at any point in the post-2008 reading. Where the old 80%-LTV constraint kept under-35s out of urban purchase markets for which their salaries could service a mortgage but their down-payment savings could not, the new architecture removes the LTV bottleneck while leaving the 45% DSTI ceiling in place.

The result, on April's data, is a mortgage book growing faster than nominal GDP for the first time since 2008, and a sharp re-weighting of the new-flow toward sub-35 borrowers in Lisboa, Porto, Setúbal and the inner-Algarve corridor. The 12-month Euribor has held in the 2.0% area through the spring, which keeps the affordability check well inside the BdP's stress-test envelope at origination — but inflates the household balance sheet's mortgage-debt-to-income ratio in a way the May Financial Stability Report has now formally named as the system's main internal risk.

How the April Print Compares

February 2003 — the last time the book grew this fast — sat near the back end of a multi-year boom that ran from 1999 through 2007 and ended in the sovereign-debt and post-2008 cleanup. The current cycle is structurally different: rates are still positive, the underwriting standard is tighter (DSTI 45%, stress test at 1.5% above origination), and the public-guarantee architecture is explicitly limited to first-time buyers under 35. But the credit-stock growth rate is the same. The supervisor will be watching closely.

What This Means for Expats

• If you are under 35 and buying your first home: The Garantia Pública Jovens is the most aggressive household credit instrument the Portuguese state has run in two decades — but it is age-gated and primary-residence-only.
• If you are over 35 or buying a second home: The Decreto-Lei 74-A/2017 framework still caps non-residents at 70% LTV and primary at 80-90%, and the BdP 45% DSTI ceiling remains binding.
• Pricing read: Average new-loan spreads have compressed roughly 30 basis points since end-2025 as banks chase the under-35 cohort. Negotiate hard if you fit the target segment.
• Risk read: The Financial Stability Report flagged a residential correction as the main internal risk this same week. If you are stretching the budget to bid in Lisbon or Porto, the 1.5% above-origination stress test is the floor — not a ceiling — for the rate scenario you should plan for.

The next data point — May's monetary-and-financial statistics — lands on 1 July. If the 10.7% pace holds or accelerates, the BdP's macroprudential request for binding powers, lodged with Government in the same May 2026 cycle, moves from procedural to urgent.