Portugal's First Annual Housing Report Is Finished, but Parliament Has Still Not Received It 16 Months After the Deadline
Since 2019 the law has required a yearly report to Parliament on the state of housing. The first, covering 2024, was due by June 2025. The ministry says it is finished but gives no date for sending it, and gives no update on the 2025 report.
The Government has still not sent Parliament the annual housing report that Portuguese law has required since 2019. The first one, covering 2024, was due by the end of June 2025. Público reported on 1 November that the office of the Minister of Infrastructure and Housing says the report is finished. It is still not public, though, and there is no date for sending it to Parliament. For the 2025 report, whose deadline passed in June this year, the ministry would not tell the newspaper how far the work had got, or whether it had started at all.
For residents, this means that in the middle of a housing crisis no official yearly account exists of whether the state's housing plan is meeting its own targets.
What the law requires
The Lei de Bases da Habitação (the Housing Framework Law, Lei n.º 83/2019) took effect on 1 October 2019. Article 18 creates a Relatório Anual da Habitação (Annual Housing Report) on "the state of the right to housing". The public body that monitors the national housing plan must produce it each year and give it to the Government. The Government must then present it to the Assembleia da República by the end of the first half of the following year. The law says the report must cover:
- whether the targets in the Programa Nacional de Habitação (PNH, the national housing programme) are being met;
- consolidated figures on yearly public spending on housing at national, regional and local level, and on how much of that budget was actually spent the year before;
- proposals and recommendations for the future.
The Conselho Nacional de Habitação, the Government's advisory council on housing, must give its opinion before the report is presented.
The law approving the PNH for 2022 to 2026 (Lei n.º 2/2024) set out the procedure. Under its Article 5, the housing institute IHRU asks public and private bodies for data by 15 December, and they reply by 31 January. The housing observatory OHARU then writes the report. The same article adds two required measures: the number of homes built by public bodies, and the number of other homes that receive public rent support. It also states that "the first annual housing report is delivered in the first half of 2025".
Nothing on the observatory's shelf
OHARU's own page lists producing the annual housing reports among its jobs. Its studies and reports page does not include one. The most recent items there are a September 2024 study of areas where housing is short or does not match local needs, and a 2023 report on renting.
What it means for you
The report would be the one official document that sets the plan's targets against its results, and the money budgeted for housing against the money spent. That matters to anyone waiting for public or rent-supported housing. It matters more now that the PNH's 2022 to 2026 term is ending and the 2027 budget plans a sharp cut in housing investment.
Data on the market still comes out. INE, the national statistics office, publishes quarterly house-price statistics down to municipal level. IHRU's Habitação em Números (Housing in Numbers) pages bring together INE, Bank of Portugal and Eurostat figures. Building data have their own gaps too: our report on how many licensed homes were actually finished shows what those figures can tell you. None of these sources, however, assesses whether public housing policy is working. That is the job the law gave to the annual report.
