Only 12% of 'Completed' 1.º Direito Homes Have Been Handed Over to Families — IHRU Books 17,000 Concluded Units Against a 26,000 PRR June 2026 Target as Lisbon's 6,090 Carry the Pipeline

A Público investigation published on the morning of Thursday 21 May 2026 recasts the headline read on Portugal's flagship social-housing programme: only 12% of the homes the Government has counted as 'completed' under 1.º Direito have actually been handed over to the beneficiary families. The remaining 88% sit in a status the Ministério das Infraestruturas e Habitação and the IHRU describe as concluídas rather than entregues, with the occupancy state of the surplus stock undocumented in the public reporting.

The Numbers Behind the Headline

The 1.º Direito — Programa de Apoio ao Acesso à Habitação — is the housing pillar of Portugal's Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência. The original PRR contractual target placed 26,000 homes in beneficiary hands by June 2026. The Government's January 2026 read-out booked ~17,000 homes as delivered, of which only 1,568 were new-build construction — roughly 9% of the booked total. The remaining ~87% reflect rehabilitation and acquisition-and-rehab of existing housing stock the IHRU contracted via the IFRRU and the autarquias.

The Público dataset compresses the picture further: of the roughly 17,000 'completed' homes, only about 2,040 — the 12% read — are formally handed over to families through the Acordos de Colaboração the IHRU signs with the municipalities. The remainder sit in a transition between completion and allocation that the Ministério attributes to the local election cycle of October 2025, to information-validation delays in the candidate database and to changes in municipal technical teams that broke the chain of custody on the allocation lists.

The Concentration Read

The geographic concentration of the delivered stock runs much higher than the population baseline: 12,610 of 16,950 booked deliveries — roughly 74% — sit inside ten municipalities. Lisbon carries 6,090 homes on its own, with the Lisboa and Porto metropolitan areas absorbing the bulk of the remaining contracted pipeline. The autarquias outside the AML and the AMP, including the rural Interior and the Alentejo's low-density municipalities, sit on lower per-capita delivery rates than the headline figure suggests.

The Investment Stack

The Ministério dos Infraestruturas booked the total programme envelope at over €4 billion of contracted investment across the eight-year cycle running back to the 2018 launch under the Costa I Government. The IHRU has contracted roughly €2.5 billion of that envelope through its Estratégias Locais de Habitação with the autarquias. The mismatch between the contracted envelope and the delivered count is the subtext of the Pinto Luz framing the minister carried into Parliament on 20 May — that the 26,000-home target survives in the language but slips on the calendar.

The PRR Calendar

The 1.º Direito is one of the PRR's stress files. The €480 million BEI-and-CEB facility the IFRRU 2030 is finalising is the bridge instrument the Government is lining up to extend the construction window past the August 2026 PRR cut-off, with the new Pacote Fiscal Habitação — the same package that pinned the 10% IMT penalty on the IVA-6% homebuyers on Tuesday — supplying the structural rules for the post-PRR phase.

What This Means for Expats

The 1.º Direito does not house non-Portuguese foreign residents directly — the eligibility cut-off runs through the habitação indigna register and the autarquia-managed candidate lists — but the delivery gap matters for the broader expat housing market in three ways.

Rental-market displacement: the slower the IHRU rolls beneficiary families out of the existing low-rent stock and into the 1.º Direito perimeter, the longer the autarquias hold tenancies in the affordable-rent floor that would otherwise transfer to the open rental market. Lisbon's 6,090-unit concentration is the highest-leverage corner of that displacement read.

Construction capacity: the 1.º Direito's 1,568 new-build figure — against a 26,000 target — points to the same constraint the open-market homebuilders flag: a labour, materials and licensing pipeline that does not scale at the velocity the OE 2026 housing envelope assumes. Foreign buyers in the pre-construction perimeter should expect longer delivery windows than 2025-vintage contracts assumed.

Policy direction: the post-PRR shift to BEI-and-CEB financing through the IFRRU 2030, and the Arrendamento Acessível moderate-rent perimeter the Ministério is repositioning as the central instrument, signal the centre of gravity is moving toward rental rather than ownership-supported housing — a frame more open to non-Portuguese tenants than the 1.º Direito itself.

The next reference point on the file is the IHRU half-year reporting cycle, due in late July, where the autarquia-by-autarquia delivery tally is updated and the residual gap against the 26,000-home PRR target is recalibrated against the actual June 2026 read.