Portugal Booked 87,764 Live Births in 2025 — +3.7% Annual Lift, One-in-Three Foreign-Mother Share and 121,817 Deaths Set the Natural-Balance Deficit at −34,053

The Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE — Portugal's National Institute of Statistics) Estatísticas Vitais (Vital Statistics) annual print for 2025 registered 87,764 live births to mothers resident in Portugal — a +3.7% lift on the 84,642 figure for 2024 and the third year-on-year increase in a decade still dominated by structural decline. The print, released in late April 2026, doubles as the demographic counterweight to the foreign net-migration cut Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal, BdP) booked into its June Boletim Económico (Economic Bulletin) this week.

The foreign-mother share

One in three of the 2025 babies was born to a foreign-national mother — a share that has more than doubled since 2018 and now anchors close to a third of total natality. The geographic spread of the foreign-mother cohort mirrors the migration corridors mapped earlier this year by Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA — Integration, Migration and Asylum Agency): Greater Lisbon, the Setúbal peninsula, the Algarve and the Greater Porto belt account for the bulk of the share, with the Brazilian, Cape Verdean and South-Asian communities driving most of the absolute volume.

The death side

The lift on the natality side did not, however, reverse the natural-balance deficit. INE recorded 121,817 deaths in 2025, +2.9% on 2024 and structurally elevated by an over-80 cohort that crossed one million for the first time in 2025. The arithmetic — 87,764 minus 121,817 — leaves a negative natural balance of −34,053. That figure has been negative every calendar year since 2009 and shows no sign of converging without a sharper birth-rate climb.

The fertility frame

INE has not yet released the 2025 final Índice Sintético de Fecundidade (Total Fertility Rate, ISF). The 2024 reading sat at 1.45 — well below the 2.1 replacement threshold and behind the EU-27 average. A +3.7% birth lift on a broadly steady fertile-female population should push the 2025 ISF modestly above 1.45 but well short of the figures Portugal logged before the 2008 financial crisis. The mean age of mothers at first birth, already past 30 in 2024, continues to climb — itself a brake on any sharper fertility recovery.

Policy versus migration arithmetic

The policy frame from the XXV Constitutional Government — IRS Jovem (Youth Personal-Income-Tax Regime) expansion, parental-leave reinforcements through Decreto-Lei (Decree-Law) 91/2023, and the housing-supply pivot signalled in BdP's demographic-versus-supply thematic study this week — operates against a demographic backdrop in which the natural-balance gap is closing only through migration. The BdP June bulletin's halved 2025 migration estimate of 6,200 monthly entries (down from 13,200 in 2024) implies that the −34,053 natural deficit will, going forward, be offset by a materially thinner migration stream.

What the population trajectory says

For Portugal's population trajectory, the +3.7% lift is welcome but does not change the structural read. INE's standing projection scenarios continue to point to a working-age population that shrinks through the 2030s under any plausible fertility path, with the dependency ratio crossing meaningful thresholds before 2035. The 2025 print is a moderation of decline, not a reversal — and the policy debate over how to fund pensions, healthcare and education while the working-age denominator contracts has only intensified through the spring.

Sources: INE — Estatísticas Vitais 2025; BdP — Boletim Económico (Junho 2026); AIMA migration mapping; Diário de Notícias (foreign-mother share).