Nova SBE's Balanço Social 2025 Places Açores Second on the National Poverty Map at 17.3% — 33.8 Gini, 17.4% Material Deprivation and the Sharpest Reliance on Social Transfers Frame the Regional Gap

The Nova SBE reading of the 2025 income and living-conditions data, released this week as the Portugal, Balanço Social 2025, places the Açores at 17.3% at-risk-of-poverty, the second-highest regional rate in the country after the Alentejo at 17.9%. The national figure sits at 15.4%, the lowest INE has measured in two decades and the headline figure we covered on Wednesday. The Nova SBE cut reframes that national average as a continental-mainland weighting that masks a sharper regional gradient — and on every material-deprivation metric the report tracks, the autonomous regions sit at the worst end of the distribution.

The Material-Deprivation Layer the National Average Hides

Material and social deprivation — a tougher measure than income-based poverty because it captures whether households can actually afford a baseline of goods and services — runs at 17.4% in the Açores, the highest regional rate in Portugal and more than six percentage points above the national average. Madeira sits second at 15.1%. Inside the Açores file, 6.9% of the population cannot afford a protein-based meal every other day and 6.7% report difficulty accessing medical consultations or treatment outside dental care. The income-inequality reading is the sharpest in the country: the regional Gini coefficient lands at 33.8, the highest of any Portuguese region and well above the Lisboa figure of 12.2% poverty risk.

The Transfer Dependency the Researchers Flag

Social transfers — pensions excluded — reduce the at-risk-of-poverty rate in the Açores and Madeira by roughly eight percentage points, compared with around four points in Greater Lisbon and the central mainland. The asymmetry signals that the autonomous regions sit closer to the structural-vulnerability line where the welfare floor does the lifting, while mainland labour-market dynamics carry more of the weight on the continent. Nova SBE's researchers are explicit that the regional gap is not a pure income story: housing quality, food security and primary-care access stack on top of the headline rate, and Açores carries the worst combined load on all three.

What This Means for Expats

• The 15.4% national figure does not describe the islands: If you are weighing a relocation to São Miguel, Terceira or Madeira, the relevant baseline is the regional read — 17.3% and 17.4% material deprivation in the Açores, 15.1% material deprivation in Madeira — not the continental average.
• Healthcare access is regionally constrained: The 6.7% Açores figure on barred medical access reflects geography and specialist-coverage gaps the SNS cannot fully close on the islands; a private-insurance overlay carries more weight on the islands than on the continent.
• Cost-of-living rankings are misleading without the wage layer: Lower nominal prices on some islands sit alongside a lower median income and a sharper Gini, so the headline 'cheaper than Lisbon' framing understates the labour-market gap.
• Transfer-dependency means policy exposure: Households closer to the welfare floor are more exposed to any pension or social-support recalibration in OE 2027; the islands carry more of that exposure than the continent.
• Alentejo, not the islands, is the highest-poverty region: The Açores file gets the regional-deprivation headline but the Alentejo at 17.9% remains the highest at-risk-of-poverty area in Portugal — relevant for anyone reading rural-relocation pitches.

The Nova SBE Balanço Social is an annual publication and the next read lands in May 2027 against the 2026 INE Inquérito às Condições de Vida e Rendimento. The Açores regional government is expected to respond formally to the regional-deprivation reading in coming weeks.