Short-Term Rental Owners Commission Their First White Paper, With a Former Economy Minister in Charge, as Porto Outpaces Lisbon on New Listings
The industry's document is due by May 2027 and takes contributions until December. Speakers at the Porto summit rejected the housing blame, and the register now holds 111,857 active units.
Portugal's short-term rental sector is to get its first white paper, coordinated by the former economy minister Manuel Caldeira Cabral and due for publication by May 2027, the Alojamento Local Porto e Norte association (ALPN) announced at the first National Short-Term Rental Summit, which ends in Porto on Thursday.
ALPN's president, Elsa Pereira, invited Caldeira Cabral, an economist at the University of Minho who was economy minister in António Costa's Socialist government, to lead the project on stage on Wednesday, and he accepted. A working version of the Livro Branco do Alojamento Local is already on the association's website, with some authors confirmed and two authors per chapter.
Open to contributions until the end of the year
The association is collecting contributions to the final text until the end of 2026, with support from institutions and universities, and anyone can send one through its website. "We will then need two or three months to compile and coordinate everything," Pereira told Lusa, for publication in the second quarter of 2027. The summit was organised by ALPN with support from Porto city council, the Porto and North tourism board and the CCDR Norte regional development commission.
The white paper is an industry initiative, not a government review, and it starts from a clear position. ALPN argues that restrictions on short-term lets are not enough to solve the housing problem, and that there is still room for the activity to grow outside the most pressured city centres.
Speakers push back on the housing blame
Caldeira Cabral said "the housing crisis cannot be explained by the creation of short-term rentals". He pointed instead to divorce, older people living alone, people returning to city centres revived by tourism, little house-sharing among young people, the 700,000 vacant or empty homes he cited, and the cost of building. He warned that large public works such as the new airport and high-speed rail would draw construction workers away from housing, and said immigration should be steered towards construction. "The housing crisis is a crisis of supply," he said.
Ana Mendes Godinho, a former Socialist labour minister who was involved in creating the short-term rental category in 2008, told the summit there are no statistics at all on operators with fewer than 10 units. She called for the short-term rental register, INE and the Tax Authority to share data, "to measure what is leaving the rental market and what is not", instead of policy built on perceptions and scapegoats.
The latest numbers
Data from Turismo de Portugal, first reported by Jornal de Notícias and cited by ECO, show 7,762 new short-term rental units registered in mainland Portugal this year. Porto registered 583 of them, almost five times Lisbon's 124. A clean-up of the national register, which removed inactive and non-compliant listings and those that had closed, cut the number of active units to 111,857, from about 118,000 last year.
Revenue has grown faster than the number of units: INE figures cited by ECO show short-term rental income rising 36 percent between 2022 and 2025, from 403 million to 548 million euros, with 383 million euros by August this year.
The debate is also running at European level, where the Commission wants a single test for when a city may curb short-term lets. Anyone thinking of letting a property to visitors can find the current rules in our guide to registering a holiday let.
