Portugal's Average Full-Time Salary Climbs to 26,202 Euros, Still the EU's Ninth Lowest, but Pay Has Outrun Prices Since 2019

The average full-time salary in Portugal reached 26,202 euros in 2025, up 4.9 percent on the year before, according to figures Eurostat (the EU statistics office) published on Friday. It is the ninth-lowest of the 26 EU countries with comparable data, and about 63 percent of the EU average of 41,464 euros.

The gap is still wide, but it is narrowing. In 2019 the Portuguese average was 18,569 euros, about 57 percent of the EU figure. Since then, Portuguese pay has risen by 41 percent in euro terms, against 26 percent for the EU as a whole.

Where Portugal sits

Eurostat's indicator is the average annual "full-time adjusted" salary per employee: gross pay, with part-time jobs converted into full-time equivalents so that countries with many part-timers are not penalised. It combines national accounts with the Labour Force Survey. The Netherlands is left out of the comparison because it uses a different method.

• Highest: Luxembourg (85,609 euros), Denmark (73,500) and Ireland (64,387).
• Lowest: Bulgaria (16,201), Greece (18,772) and Hungary (20,138).
• Portugal's neighbours in the table: Czechia, just below at 25,755 euros, and Croatia, just above at 26,933. Spain stands at 35,125 euros, so the average Portuguese full-time salary is about three quarters of the Spanish one.

Below Portugal are Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Latvia, Poland and Czechia. Others have been catching up faster. In 2019, eleven EU countries had a lower average than Portugal; three of them, Lithuania, Estonia and Croatia, have since moved ahead. Lithuania's average rose from 18,337 euros in 2019 to 32,170 in 2025, and Poland's from 13,640 to 23,853.

What it means after inflation

Eurostat's figures are not adjusted for inflation. Set against its own harmonised consumer price index, the picture for Portugal is better than the ranking suggests. Prices in Portugal rose by about 20 percent between 2019 and 2025, so the 41 percent rise in average pay works out at a real gain of roughly 17 percent. For the EU as a whole, pay and prices both rose by about 26 percent over the same years, leaving the average real salary close to where it was in 2019.

In 2025 alone, Portuguese inflation averaged 2.2 percent, so the 4.9 percent rise in average pay left full-time employees about 2.6 percent better off in real terms. These real-terms figures are our own calculation from Eurostat's two series.

What it means for you

Most employees in Portugal are paid in 14 instalments, with the holiday and Christmas months paid twice. On that basis, 26,202 euros is about 1,870 euros gross per payment, before the employee's social security contribution and IRS (income tax) withholding. Spread over 12 months, it is about 2,180 euros.

An average is pulled up by high earners, so most full-time workers earn less than this figure. For comparison, the national minimum wage was 870 euros a month in 2025, or 12,180 euros a year over 14 payments: less than half the average. It rose to 920 euros in 2026, and the government has pencilled in 970 euros for 2027, as we reported when inflation trimmed the real value of this year's increase.

For anyone weighing a move or a job offer, the comparison cuts both ways. Gross pay in Portugal remains well below the EU average and about a quarter below Spain's, which is part of why so many people still leave: Statistics Portugal's revised count puts 782,000 departures in five years. But since 2019, Portuguese pay has grown faster than prices, which has not been true of the EU average.

The full country table is in Eurostat's nama_10_fte dataset, and the release is on Eurostat's news page.