Eleven Years Added 3.3 Percent to What an Hour of Portuguese Work Produces, Against 8.8 Percent Across the EU, and 2025 Came In Below 2022

Eurostat refreshed its labour productivity series on 8 September, and the numbers in it are worth reading carefully, because the story they tell depends entirely on which of two measures you pick.

Take output per hour worked. Between 2014 and 2025, real labour productivity per hour rose 3.3 percent in Portugal. Across the EU27 over the same eleven years it rose 8.8 percent. Only three member states did worse than Portugal: Luxembourg, where the measure fell 5.3 percent, Italy, down 1.2 percent, and France, up 2.5 percent. Portugal is fourth from the bottom of a table of twenty-seven.

Now take output per person employed. On that measure Portugal rose 5.5 percent between 2015 and 2025, which is fractionally ahead of the EU27's 5.4 percent, and puts the country twelfth from the bottom rather than near it.

Both figures are correct. The difference between them is the number of hours Portuguese people work.

The hours

In 2025 the average person in employment in Portugal worked 1,903.9 hours. The EU27 average was 1,604.2. Germany's was 1,336.4.

Only three countries put in longer years than Portugal: Poland at 1,989.5 hours, Greece at 1,977.3 and Croatia at 1,945.7. A Portuguese worker puts in roughly 300 hours a year more than the European average, which is close to eight extra forty-hour weeks, and roughly 570 hours more than a German one.

That is the whole reconciliation. Measured per person, Portugal keeps pace with Europe because its workers are at their posts for longer. Measured per hour, which is the measure that actually tracks how much value an hour of work creates, it does not keep pace at all. The flattering number is the one that quietly counts the extra hours as an achievement.

The level, not just the growth

Growth rates only tell you about movement. The level tells you where you are standing.

Expressed in purchasing power standards as a percentage of the EU27 average, Portugal's labour productivity per hour worked was 66.7 percent in 2025. Three countries sit below it: Greece at 54.5 percent, Bulgaria at 59.0 and Latvia at 62.0. Croatia at 67.7 and Poland at 68.4 sit just above.

Fourth from the bottom on the growth measure, fourth from the bottom on the level measure. The two are not independent, but seeing them line up removes the usual comfort that a low level at least comes with fast catch-up.

The series over time is where it gets uncomfortable. Portugal stood at 67.6 percent of the EU average in 2015. It fell through 2017 and 2018, bottomed at 64.2 percent in 2020, climbed back to 68.2 percent in 2024, and then dropped to 66.7 percent in 2025. Eleven years on, the country is further from the European average than it was at the start.

The last three years went backwards

Indexed to 2015, Portugal's real productivity per hour worked reached 103.9 in 2022. It fell to 102.2 in 2023, recovered to 103.6 in 2024, and came in at 103.6 again in 2025, marginally below where it stood three years earlier.

The EU27 index over the same stretch went 106.2, 105.4, 105.7, 107.2. Europe also stalled in 2023 and also recovered, but it finished the run above where it started. Portugal finished it below.

Why this is happening alongside record employment

None of this contradicts the labour market news of the past few months, and it is not in tension with it either. It is the arithmetic of it.

Portugal added jobs faster than any other EU country last quarter, and the count of people in work reached 5.49 million, the highest ever recorded. Productivity per person is output divided by the number of people producing it. If employment grows quickly and output grows at a similar rate, the ratio barely moves, no matter how much total output has risen.

That is close to what the numbers show. The economy has been absorbing a large number of additional workers, a rising share of them foreign nationals, into sectors that are labour-intensive by nature: tourism and hospitality, construction, retail, agriculture, and a clothing and textile sector that still employs 118,000 people across nearly 12,000 companies. Those are real jobs producing real value. They are not, on the whole, the kind of work where an extra hour produces markedly more than it did a decade ago.

The corollary is the one that shows up in pay packets. Wages cannot durably outrun what an hour of work produces. Portuguese wages grew 5.1 percent in the second quarter of this year, and faster inflation left workers only 1.8 percent better off in real terms. The Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal) flagged the same pressure point in its June Boletim Económico, noting the minimum wage had reached 91 percent of the median and setting the wage question directly against productivity. The productivity number is the ceiling, and this is where the ceiling currently sits.

Reading the caveats honestly

Three qualifications belong on these figures.

First, the 2025 values are flagged provisional in the Eurostat release and will be revised. Revisions to national accounts data of this kind are routinely a few tenths of a percentage point, which would not change the ranking but could shift the exact numbers.

Second, the starting year matters, and anyone quoting a single ranking should say which window they used. Measured from 2014, Portugal is fourth worst in the EU27 on productivity per hour with 3.3 percent growth. Measured from 2015, it is sixth worst with 3.6 percent. Measured from 2011, it is fourth worst with 4.7 percent. Measured from 2013, it is third worst with 2.0 percent. The precise position moves around by a place or two depending on where you start counting; what does not move is that Portugal is always in the bottom handful, and always well under half the EU27 rate.

Third, this is a whole-economy average. It says nothing about any individual firm or sector, and Portugal has plenty of businesses operating at or above the European frontier. What it measures is the mix: an economy whose composition still leans heavily on activities where output per hour is structurally low.

What would actually move it

Productivity per hour rises through capital deepening (more and better equipment per worker), through skills, through firms growing to a size at which fixed investment pays back, and through resources shifting out of low-productivity activities into higher ones. None of those is a policy that delivers inside an electoral cycle, which is a large part of why the number has proved so stubborn across governments of different colours.

What the 2015 to 2025 comparison establishes is narrower and harder to argue with. Over eleven years that included a pandemic, a European recovery fund, a construction boom, a tourism boom and the fastest employment growth in the Union, the amount of value produced by an hour of Portuguese work rose by roughly three percent. The rest of Europe managed close to nine. And on the measure that strips out how long people are at work, Portugal ended the period a little further behind the European average than it started.

All figures in this article are taken from the Eurostat dataset on labour productivity and unit labour costs (nama_10_lp_ulc), in the version published on 8 September 2026, and are calculated directly from the published series. Values for 2025 are provisional.