INE Counts 11,424,031 Residents at the End of 2025 as Foreigners Reach 14% of the Population — Algarve Leads at 27.9% Foreign, Greater Lisbon at 22.6% and the Median Age Stands at 45.8

Portugal ended 2025 with 11,424,031 residents, the highest count on record, according to provisional figures released on Monday morning by the Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE, Statistics Portugal). The population grew by 36,809 people over the course of the year, a rise of 0.32% on 2024, and has now expanded by 824,914 inhabitants since 2021 — a cumulative gain of roughly 7.8% in just four years.

The headline number tells two stories at once: Portugal is simultaneously older and more foreign-born than at any point in its modern history. The number of foreign residents reached 1,597,539, equivalent to 14% of the total population. A decade ago, foreign nationals accounted for less than 4% of residents, making the current share a structural shift rather than a statistical blip.

Immigration is the engine behind the growth. Portugal's natural balance — births minus deaths — has been negative for years, and the country would be shrinking without net inward migration. The INE data confirm that population gains are now driven almost entirely by arrivals from abroad, a pattern shared with much of southern Europe but unusually pronounced in Portugal given the scale of recent inflows.

The foreign-born population is far from evenly distributed. The Algarve records the highest concentration, with foreign nationals making up 27.9% of residents — more than one in four people living in the southern tourist region. Greater Lisbon (Grande Lisboa) follows at 22.6%. Both figures dwarf the national average and reflect the pull of the labour market, the tourism economy and, in the Algarve's case, a long-established community of northern European retirees.

At the same time, the median age climbed to 45.8 years, underlining the demographic ageing that continues to strain the pension system, the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS, National Health Service) and the long-term care network. Without the younger profile of many recent immigrants, the median age would be higher still, and the working-age base needed to fund public services would be shrinking faster.

The numbers land in the middle of a charged political debate. The government has tightened immigration rules over the past year and overhauled the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA, Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum), while opposition parties and employers' groups warn that the economy depends on the very inflows now being curbed. Monday's release gives both sides fresh ammunition: evidence that immigration is propping up the population, and evidence that the pace of change has been extraordinarily rapid.

For residents and newcomers alike, the data sketch the Portugal of the mid-2020s — a country of 11.4 million people, one in seven of them foreign, ageing steadily and increasingly reliant on migration to keep its towns, services and tax base intact.