Registered Job Vacancies Climbed 23% in 2025 as Immigrants Came to Fund a Fifth of Portugal's Social Security
Job offers registered at Portugal's IEFP rose 22.8% to 134,100 in 2025, led by services and construction, with 69.2% of vacancies filled. The report also found foreign workers now make up more than a fifth of Social Security contributors.
Portugal's public employment service registered far more job vacancies last year, and foreign workers now underpin a striking share of the labour force keeping those posts filled. Figures presented to the Ministry of Labour show that job offers logged at the IEFP (Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional — Institute for Employment and Vocational Training) rose 22.8% in 2025, to 134,100 registrations.
The data, compiled by the Centro de Relações Laborais (CRL — Labour Relations Centre) and presented on 21 July, offer a rare bottom-up view of where Portugal's labour demand is actually concentrated — and how much of the supply now comes from immigration.
Where the jobs are
Services dominated, accounting for 99,600 of the vacancies registered — 16,200 more than the year before. Industry was the other main driver, adding 7,300 offers. Within the totals, construction stood out both for its weight, at 6.7% of all offers, and its momentum, with vacancies up 53.6% year on year. Food, drink and tobacco (2.8%), clothing (2.3%) and metalworking and metal products (1.9%) followed, while agriculture added a more modest 1,300 offers.
The IEFP did not just advertise more posts; it filled more of them. Placements rose 15.7% — 12,600 more people put into work — and the service's centres ended up filling 69.2% of the vacancies registered with them.
The immigration story underneath
The most consequential line in the report is not about vacancies at all, but about who is available to take them. Foreign workers now represent more than one fifth of the people paying into Portuguese Social Security, and the CRL identified immigration as one of the main factors behind the expansion of the country's labour supply.
That single statistic reframes much of the current debate. Portugal's growth sectors — tourism and hospitality, construction, care work, agriculture — have leaned heavily on migrant labour, and the Social Security numbers put a figure on the dependence. Whatever the political temperature around immigration and the reforms working their way through AIMA (Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo — the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum), the labour-market arithmetic is unambiguous: without foreign contributors, a fifth of the payroll base would simply not be there.
What it means for residents
For anyone job-hunting in Portugal, the composition of the demand is instructive: services and construction are where the openings are multiplying fastest, and the IEFP’s own centres are a channel worth using, given how large a share of listed vacancies they manage to fill. For foreign residents already working here, the figures are a reminder that immigrants are not at the margins of the economy but at its contributory core.
The broader caution is that a labour market this reliant on inward migration is also exposed to the pace of it. Arrivals have slowed since their mid-decade peak, and if that continues, the sectors advertising the most vacancies are also the ones that will feel any squeeze first.
