INE Logs Portugal's Poverty Risk at 15.4% for 2024 — the Lowest Read in Twenty Years on the Inquérito às Condições de Vida e Rendimento Released on Wednesday 20 May

The Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE) released the headline reading of its Inquérito às Condições de Vida e Rendimento (ICOR) 2025 on the morning of Wednesday 20 May 2026, placing the at-risk-of-poverty rate in Portugal at 15.4% on 2024 income data — the lowest level recorded in two decades and a 1.2-percentage-point drop from the 16.6% read on 2023 income. Roughly 100,000 people moved out of the poverty bracket between the two reference years according to the statistical office's own calculation, the cleanest single-year decline since the post-troika recovery cycle.

The Threshold and the Distribution

The 60%-of-median-equivalised-disposable-income threshold that frames the European at-risk-of-poverty methodology landed at €8,679 per adult equivalent for the year, or roughly €723 per month. The median disposable income per adult equivalent climbed from €9,856 in 2014 to €14,951 in 2024, a real purchasing-power gain of 25.2% across the decade once inflation is netted out. The Gini coefficient eased to 30.9% from 31.9% the previous year and the S80/S20 ratio — the share of total income held by the top quintile divided by the share held by the bottom quintile — fell to 4.9 from 5.2, both readings consistent with a compression of the income spread.

The Sub-Group Reads

In-work poverty — the share of employed adults who still sit below the poverty threshold despite holding a job — eased to 8.6% from 9.2% the year before, but remains structurally elevated and concentrated in part-time, fixed-term and seasonal-contract cohorts. The poverty-risk rate among the unemployed dropped sharply to 42.6% from 44.3%, a 1.7-point compression tied to the unemployment-benefit calibration and the minimum-social-income reform that ran through 2025. The poverty rate among retirees compressed by 3.3 percentage points year-on-year — the steepest sub-group improvement on the release — reflecting the cumulative impact of the actualização extraordinária on the minimum pension and the recalibration of the Complemento Solidário para Idosos (CSI) through the 2025 State Budget cycle.

The Numbers That Stay Stubbornly Large

Despite the headline improvement, the absolute population sitting below the poverty threshold remains substantial. INE places the count at roughly 1.6 million people still under the line on the 2024 reading, including a child-population segment of around 301,000 under-18s and an elderly segment of around 541,000 pensioners. The at-risk-of-poverty-or-social-exclusion (AROPE) rate — the broader composite that adds material-and-social-deprivation and very-low-work-intensity overlays to the headline income measure — stood at 18.6% on the 2025 release, covering an estimated 1.995 million people.

The Regional Spread

The regional NUTS II decomposition continues to flag the Alentejo as carrying the highest sub-national poverty rate at 17.9%, followed by the Norte and Centro regions. Área Metropolitana de Lisboa sits at the bottom of the regional table at 12.2%, the same ranking the ICOR has produced consistently across the past decade — a structural rural-coastal-versus-metropolitan divide that the income improvement at the national headline does not by itself resolve.

What This Means for Expats

Three reads stand out for foreign residents reading the data set.

Affordability calibration: the €8,679 annual at-risk-of-poverty threshold per adult equivalent is the official statistical anchor for the median income spread; that figure is the floor benchmark against which the Indexante dos Apoios Sociais (IAS), the minimum social income and the minimum wage are calibrated in the State Budget cycle.

Region pick: expats weighing a regional move beyond the Lisbon-Porto axis should read the Alentejo and Centro poverty distributions as a signal of the public-services and labour-market spread that frames pricing on rentals, hospitality and local services in the interior.

Public-service load: the residual 1.6 million poverty count sustains the demand pressure on the Segurança Social, the Serviço Nacional de Saúde and the school-feeding and social-tariff programmes — the same fiscal lines that finance the parallel investment programmes funded through PRR and Portugal 2030.

The full ICOR data set — including the gender, age and household-composition decomposition — runs in the dedicated INE module on the Portal de Estatísticas, with the next reference point being the Living Conditions Indicators bulletin scheduled before the European semester filing window in autumn 2026.