782,000 people left Portugal in five years, INE's new count shows. In 2025 more than half of those who left were foreigners
The National Statistics Institute, INE, has recalculated how many people leave Portugal long-term, meaning for more than a year. It used to rely on the employment survey, in which household members who stayed behind reported on those who had left; now it uses registration data. By the new count, more than 782,000 people left the country between 2021 and 2025 (ECO).
Earlier estimates were less than half that: the Emigration Observatory (Observatório da Emigração) counted no more than 350,000 over the same five years. The difference is that the observatory counted only Portuguese citizens, while INE counts foreigners too. According to INE, 67,754 Portuguese citizens and 53,043 foreigners left in 2021, and in 2025, of the 179,948 people who left, 95,365 were foreigners — more than half (Jornal de Negócios).
The sociologist Rui Pena Pires, a former head of the observatory, considers the new method much more accurate but warns that a foreigner is counted as having left once they disappear from the records. That does not necessarily mean the person has gone home or moved to another country — some may still be in Portugal without papers.
The day before, on 4 November, the Bank of Portugal reported that in the second quarter of 2026 foreigners made up almost 40% of construction workers, compared with one in seven in 2010. The bank's governor, Álvaro Santos Pereira, has repeatedly warned that without immigrants, construction and tourism would run short of workers (Observador).
