Portugal Logged 375 Collective Redundancy Procedures by July, the Most Since the Pandemic, and Fewer People Actually Lost Their Jobs

Portuguese employers notified 375 collective redundancy procedures in the first seven months of 2026, the highest January to July count since the pandemic year of 2020. The figure, published on Tuesday by the Direção-Geral do Emprego e das Relações de Trabalho (Directorate-General for Employment and Labour Relations, DGERT), is about 13 percent above the 332 recorded a year earlier.

The second number moves the other way. Workers actually dismissed through those procedures fell 11.4 percent, from 4,578 to 4,055. More companies are cutting. Each cut is smaller. The trend was flagged earlier this year, when collective layoffs hit a five-year high.

The two lines are diverging

DGERT's monthly report, compiled from filings received up to 31 July, sets the series out in full. It bottomed at 320 for the whole of 2018, hit 698 in 2020, fell back to 330 in 2022, then rose in each of the last three years: 431 in 2023, 497 in 2024 and 552 in 2025. At 375 by July, 2026 is tracking above all of them except 2020. It arrives in a month when industrial production fell for a third consecutive month.

July on its own carried 62 notified procedures, the busiest July since 2013 and up from 44 a year earlier.

Against that, the workers ledger is calm. Full-year 2025 named 6,714 people and dismissed 6,530; 2020 named 8,033 and dismissed 7,513. Through July 2026 the totals are 4,250 and 4,055, with 79 revocations and 116 people redeployed under other measures.

Small firms, big region, familiar sectors

Size explains much of the divergence. Of the 375 procedures, 174 came from small companies (10 to 49 employees) and 105 from micro-companies under 10. Only 28 came from large employers of 250 or more. A wave made of small firms produces many filings and few names; only the exceptions, such as MEO's 1,200-job restructuring or the Gaia shoe factory that went insolvent owing July wages, are counted in people.

Geography is concentrated. Lisbon and the Tagus Valley accounted for 221 of the 375, against 104 in the North, 36 in the Centre and seven each in the Alentejo and the Algarve. In July alone the region supplied 391 of the 624 people dismissed, or 63 percent.

By sector in July, manufacturing and the telecommunications, software and information services grouping each accounted for 21 percent of procedures, followed by wholesale and retail on 14 percent. Of those actually dismissed, 371 were men and 253 were women. Retail strain is already in the national accounts: shops sold more in July and employed fewer people. In almost four cases out of five the stated ground was simply a reduction in headcount (78 percent), rather than the definitive closure of a business (14 percent) or the shutting of a section (8 percent).

What This Means for Expats

• The legal threshold is low. Under articles 359 and following of the Código do Trabalho (Labour Code), a collective dismissal covers as few as two workers at a firm under 50 employees, or five at a larger one, within any three-month window.
• Compensation is fixed by statute. Twelve days of base pay plus seniority payments for each complete year of service, under the formula set by Lei 69/2013.
• Lisbon is not the safe harbour it looks. The capital region generated nearly six in ten procedures, and the technology cluster many foreign residents work in is now level with manufacturing.
• A headline unemployment rate will not warn you. Registered unemployment has kept falling while this series climbed, and the rate touched 5.3 percent in the summer, its lowest since 2011. The two measure different things.

The August reading lands in a few weeks. The number to watch is not the total but the gap between procedures notified and workers named. If it keeps widening, Portugal is running a churn of small closures rather than a downturn. If the workers line turns up to meet the procedures line, that reading changes fast.