Nearly One in Six Adults in Portugal Drink Every Day, Three Times the EU Rate and the Highest in the Union
Eurostat figures for 2025 put daily drinking in Portugal at 16 percent of people aged 16 or over, against 4.8 percent in the EU. Almost half of men aged 65 or over drink every day, while young people drink less than the EU average.
Portugal is the European Union's daily-drinking country, and by a wide margin. In 2025, 16.0 percent of people aged 16 or over in Portugal drank alcohol every day, according to Eurostat data the EU statistics office highlighted on Monday. The EU average was 4.8 percent. Italy came second at 7.9 percent, followed by Belgium and Denmark at 7.5 percent. France was at 5.9 percent and Spain at 5.6 percent.
The figures come from the EU survey on income and living conditions (EU-SILC), which asked people in every member state how often they had drunk alcohol in the previous 12 months. Eurostat's release led with the EU picture; the Portuguese figures are in the table behind it.
Older men drive the number
Daily drinking in Portugal is concentrated among men and older people. 26.4 percent of men drink every day, against 6.7 percent of women. Among people aged 65 or over the share is 28.2 percent, and among men of that age it is 49.4 percent: almost one in two. The EU figure for men aged 65 or over is 14.3 percent.
Young people are the exception. Only 0.6 percent of 16 to 24 year olds in Portugal drink daily, slightly below the EU's 0.8 percent, and 53.7 percent of them had not drunk at all in the previous year, against 44.4 percent across the EU. From there, daily drinking climbs with every age band: 3.1 percent at 25 to 34, 9.5 percent at 35 to 49, 20.7 percent at 50 to 64 and 30.3 percent at 65 to 74.
Daily drinkers and abstainers, and little in between
Portugal also has more non-drinkers than the EU as a whole. 37.0 percent of adults had never drunk, or had not drunk in 2025, against 33.5 percent in the EU; among Portuguese women the figure is 49.8 percent. What Portugal lacks is the middle. 16.5 percent drink every week and 14.2 percent every month, compared with 19.2 and 21.8 percent across the EU. In France, by contrast, 29.6 percent drink weekly and only 5.9 percent daily.
Eurostat notes that across the EU, people at risk of poverty or social exclusion drink less than others. In Portugal that holds for abstention: 51.2 percent of people at risk did not drink during the year, against 33.8 percent of those not at risk. It does not hold for daily drinking, which is almost the same in both groups, at 15.4 and 16.2 percent.
Falling, but not closing the gap
The previous round of the survey, for 2022, put daily drinking in Portugal at 19.3 percent, so the share has fallen by 3.3 points in three years. It fell among men (from 31.5 to 26.4 percent) and among women (from 8.5 to 6.7 percent). Portugal was first in 2022 as well, ahead of Italy at 12.0 percent. But the EU average fell faster, from an estimated 6.7 percent to 4.8 percent, so Portugal's rate is now 3.3 times the EU's, up from 2.9 times.
The survey measures how often people drink, not how much: a glass of wine with lunch counts the same as heavier daily drinking, and the table says nothing about harm. For other angles, see last week's figures from the addiction institute ICAD on risk behaviour among teenagers, and the GNR's count of drivers stopped over the criminal alcohol limit.
Sources: Eurostat, "5% of Europeans consumed alcohol daily in 2025" (28 September 2026); Eurostat dataset ilc_hch23, frequency of alcohol consumption by sex, age and poverty status (EU-SILC, 2022 and 2025).
Feature image: a glass of red wine in a Lisbon restaurant. Photo by tak.wing (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
