Portugal Records the Second-Biggest Fall in Wealth Concentration Among 57 Countries Since 2005, Allianz Report Finds

The richest tenth of Portugal's population holds a noticeably smaller slice of the country's financial wealth than it did twenty years ago, and only one country out of 57 recorded a bigger fall. The top 10 percent owned 57.4 percent of Portuguese households' net financial assets in 2025. That share has dropped by roughly six percentage points since 2005 (the report shows the size of the fall only in a chart), according to the Allianz Global Wealth Report 2026, published by the insurer's economics unit, Allianz Research, on 29 September.

Cambodia was the only country in the study with a steeper decline. Slovakia came third. The business daily Jornal de Negócios first reported the Portuguese figure on 5 October.

What the report measured

The Allianz report tracks household financial assets: bank deposits and cash, shares, bonds and investment funds, and claims on insurers and pension funds. Debts are subtracted to give net financial assets. Housing is not included in this measure. The distribution estimates draw on Eurostat, the European Central Bank, national central banks, statistical offices, the IMF and the World Inequality Database, among other sources.

Across all 57 countries, the picture is one of stalemate. On a simple average, the richest 10 percent held 60.4 percent of national net financial wealth in 2005 and 60.9 percent in 2025. In 32 countries the top-decile share moved by less than two percentage points over the two decades. Where bigger shifts happened, concentration rose in 16 countries and fell in only nine.

Portugal is one of those nine. The report groups it with Latvia and Ireland as countries that "moved down from relatively high levels of concentration", while Slovakia, Hungary and the Netherlands improved from positions that were already more balanced.

The typical household also gained ground

The report runs a second check: the ratio between average and median net financial wealth. When the average races ahead of the median, gains are piling up at the top; when the ratio shrinks, the household in the middle is catching up. Portugal recorded the sixth-largest narrowing of that gap between 2005 and 2025 among the countries studied. Across all 57, the average ratio barely moved, from 3.11 to 3.12.

How Portugal compares in Europe

At 57.4 percent, Portugal's top-decile share now sits below the 57-country average of 60.9 percent. Within the European Union it lands in the middle of the pack:

• Spain: 53.5 percent
• France: 54.8 percent (up 3.1 percentage points since 2005)
• Netherlands: 56.1 percent (down 2.4 points)
• Portugal: 57.4 percent
• Germany: 59.5 percent
• Italy: 60.6 percent
• Austria: 64.1 percent
• Ireland: 66.3 percent
• Sweden: 68.2 percent

Outside Europe, the trend often ran the other way. China recorded by far the largest increase, with its richest 10 percent gaining 15.7 points to reach 68.0 percent. In the United States the top-decile share rose 4.0 points to 68.2 percent.

Portuguese households' balance sheet in 2025

The report's country tables give a snapshot of where Portuguese households stood at the end of last year:

• Gross financial assets: 628 billion euros, up 6.5 percent on 2024, or 60,290 euros per person (204.7 percent of GDP).
• Liabilities: 214 billion euros, up 7.7 percent, or 20,565 euros per person (69.8 percent of GDP).
• Net financial assets: 414 billion euros, up 5.9 percent, or 39,729 euros per person.

On net financial assets per person, Portugal ranks 24th of the 57 countries, just ahead of the Czech Republic and behind South Korea. Globally, household financial assets reached a record 268.4 trillion euros in 2025, a rise of 8.6 percent.

What it means, and what it leaves out

For an ordinary household, the finding suggests that savings, pension pots and investments are spread a little less unevenly in Portugal than they were in the mid-2000s. That is unusual: most countries in the study either stood still or moved towards greater concentration.

Two cautions apply. First, the measure excludes property, which is where most Portuguese families keep the bulk of their wealth. Allianz's separate real estate analysis does not cover Portugal at all, for lack of data. The household finance survey from the Instituto Nacional de Estatística (National Statistics Institute) found that housing was the main driver of a 29.4 percent five-year rise in Portuguese families' net wealth, as we reported in May. Second, the distribution figures are model estimates built from several datasets, so they are best read as a direction of travel rather than a precise count.

The report's overall message is sober. Allianz concludes that two decades of growth, crises and political attention "have barely altered the underlying distribution" of wealth inside most countries. Portugal is one of the few places where the needle has moved. For more on how Portuguese households hold their money, and why so much still sits in bank deposits, see our July report on household financial wealth.