Portugal's 2026 Teacher Recruitment Concurso Lands 32,514 External Applications for Just 8,465 Permanent Slots — A 24% Vacancy Cut as Fenprof Warns the Quadro Gap Will 'Continue to Worsen'

The Ministério da Educação, Ciência e Inovação's 2026 teacher recruitment concurso closed application admissions with 32,514 external candidates cleared into the running for the externally advertised 2026/2027 quadro slots, and a further 35,924 internal candidates — currently in the system on contracted positions — competing for transfer or upgrade. The figures, released by the Direção-Geral da Administração Escolar (DGAE) and reported by Público on Sunday, sit roughly flat against the 2025 round (33,050 internal, 36,328 external) but land against a substantially smaller pool of available permanent positions.

The provisional 2026/27 vacancy list opens just 8,465 quadro slots nationally, a 24% reduction on the 11,000+ posts the Ministry tendered for entry into permanent contracts in the 2025 round.

Where the Demand Is Concentrated

The candidate stack is heavily weighted toward early-years and primary teaching, exactly the groups the school system is most short of:

• Pre-school education (Grupo 100): 7,456 candidates
• 1st-cycle basic education (Grupo 110): 5,662 candidates
• Physical education (two groups, 260 and 620): high concentrations

The first-cycle group — teachers who cover children aged 6 to 10 — is the segment Portuguese schools have flagged repeatedly as the most acute staffing shortage in the country, particularly across rural Beira Interior and Alentejo agrupamentos that have been running with permanent-substitute rotations for two academic years.

The Complaint Window Closes Thursday

The ranked provisional lists are now open for complaint submissions through Thursday, 7 May 2026. After that date the lists become definitive and slot allocations begin in late May for the September 2026 academic-year start. Candidates who do not place into a quadro position will continue in the contracted-teacher pool — the contratação de escola route — which sits outside this concurso and is filled by individual agrupamentos directly through the school year.

Fenprof: 'The Problem Will Continue to Worsen'

The Federação Nacional dos Professores has used the announcement to push back hard on the vacancy reduction. Secretary-general José Feliciano Costa told reporters that, with rejection of so many candidates from permanent contracts, 'o problema vai continuar a persistir, vai continuar a agravar-se' — the problem will continue, and will continue to worsen. Fenprof's argument is that the headline number does not reflect the actual short-staffing inside schools, where contracted teachers fill genuine permanent needs while sitting on annual instability.

What This Means for Expats

• School staffing remains tight in 2026/27. Foreign-resident families relying on the public network should expect continued mid-year teacher rotations, particularly in 1st-cycle classes outside Lisboa-Oeiras and Porto-Matosinhos.
• Private-school capacity won't ease. Demand pressure for non-public schools — the alternative most expats consider when public-school disruption hits — has been climbing since 2024 and is expected to extend through the 2026/27 enrolment window.
• Bilingual and international tracks compete for the same pool. A non-trivial share of the qualified physical-education and English-instruction candidates will accept private-school offers if their public placement falls into rural districts they cannot relocate to — the international schools' hiring season runs in parallel.
• For teaching-credentialed expats: the contratação de escola route remains open through summer for non-quadro slots; the parallel pattern in the SNS family-doctor concurso shows how a high-vacancy public-system round can still leave individual openings unfilled at the school or unit level.
• Watch the 7 May complaint deadline. The list of unfilled slots after that window typically signals which districts will run with contracted-only staff in September — and where international-school waiting lists will tighten through August.