Portugal Sits With the Netherlands and Switzerland on a New List of Countries Where an Average Salary No Longer Reaches a Home

A team at the Vienna University of Technology has spent a year reading property adverts instead of official statistics, on the grounds that no comparable official statistics exist. It gathered more than 18 million sale listings and 3.5 million rental adverts published across 31 countries between March 2024 and March 2025, matched them against median regional incomes, and worked out how many square metres an ordinary salary actually buys.

Portugal came out in a category with only two other members. Alongside the Netherlands and Switzerland, the study labels the Portuguese market "systematically inaccessible" to a buyer on an average wage. That is a different claim from the familiar one about expensive capitals. It says the problem is not concentrated in Lisbon; it runs through the country.

What the numbers say

Across Europe, the researchers found that only 44 percent of people live in a city where somebody on a median income could buy a flat or studio of around 50 square metres. About 39 percent could not even rent a home that size. Stretch the definition to a 30-year mortgage and the picture improves: more than 70 percent of Europeans live in regions where median income would service a loan on a property up to 75 square metres.

Madrid, Paris and Berlin are named as the least accessible cities on the continent. Lisbon appears in the next tier, with Dublin, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest, where more than 65 percent of residents live in areas in which a third of the local salary buys under 50 square metres of rented space.

The authors add a warning about their own method. Because a small number of very high earners pulls the average upward, the real difficulty facing most residents is worse than the figures suggest.

The coastal finding

The part of the study most relevant to foreign residents concerns the coast. Housing in popular tourist areas, coastal and mountain alike, is less accessible than elsewhere, and the pressure is described as especially critical along the coasts of Spain, France, Portugal, Greece and Croatia. The mechanism the authors identify is second-home owners and short-term tenants bidding up local markets and displacing residents.

Their suggested response is regulatory rather than fiscal: control the short-term rental platforms so that residential stock is not allocated to tourism in bulk, and put limits on the second-home market. They also caution that national policies are often ineffective, because housing markets are regional in a way that legislation rarely is.

"Our study reveals very sharp pockets of inaccessibility," said the lead author, Franziska Sielker, a professor of urban and regional research at the Vienna institute of spatial planning. The findings were published in the journal Maps, and reached Portuguese readers through Lusa.

What this means for expats

• The ratio, not the price: the study measures square metres per euro of local income, which is why a market can look cheap to an arriving foreign buyer and be unreachable for the person already living there.
• It matches the domestic data: Idealista's own reading in August found that renting absorbs 82 percent of a Portuguese salary and buying 76 percent.
• Borrowing is tighter too: the Bank of Portugal cut the maximum debt-service ratio to 45 percent on 1 August, which removes some of the room the study assumes a 30-year mortgage provides.
• State support is rationed: the young-buyer public guarantee has already run through two banks' allocations, and Wednesday's despacho topped it up by 100 million euros.
• Budget realistically: our guide to the cost of living in Portugal in 2026 sets out what housing takes out of a monthly budget in each region.