Portugal is short of workers: unemployment has fallen to 5.3%, the lowest level since 2011. Speaking last week, Economy Minister Manuel Castro Almeida said that for anyone arriving with a signed contract and somewhere to live, settling in Portugal will be about as easy as it gets — and that the state of the labour market is precisely why. Not everyone, though, can get into that market. We look at why the country needs people so badly, and who is actually in demand here.
Why Portugal Doesn’t Have Enough People
At 5.3%, unemployment really is very low. But reading that figure as “the market will take anyone” would be a mistake.
Portugal is ageing, and it has few children. At the same time it keeps losing its own citizens: roughly 70,000 Portuguese leave every year — many of them for jobs in wealthier EU countries. The country remains the EU leader by share of its population living abroad, and it is not only manual workers who go: over the past twenty years, the share of emigrants holding a university degree has tripled. Sociologists name the reason plainly — the pay gap and the cost of housing.
For the last few years, immigration has been filling that hole. Between 2021 and 2025 the country added roughly 455,000 jobs, and the active population grew by almost the same number: the market was not reshuffling existing workers, it was absorbing new ones. Now the inflow is slowing, partly because of the new entry rules, and analysts warn that the labour shortage is turning from a seasonal problem into a permanent one.
So low unemployment here is not a sign of a booming economy. It is closer to a symptom of there simply not being enough workers in the country. Labour underutilisation — a measure that counts not only the unemployed but also those working fewer hours than they would like — is already estimated at 9.1%.
Demand, meanwhile, genuinely is growing. The number of vacancies registered with the state employment service rose by almost a quarter over the year, and it is growing fastest in construction.
Who Is in Demand?
The most obvious shortage of specialists in Portugal right now is in healthcare. Doctors, nurses and care workers are missing across the system, and hospitals have been recruiting foreigners directly for several years. But the barrier here is a hard one: your diploma must be recognised through the relevant professional chamber, and without the language you will not be working at all.
Construction is where demand is rising fastest. Electricians, welders, plumbers, masons, ventilation specialists. Diploma recognition is usually not required, and everyday conversational Portuguese is enough. This is where the bulk of new arrivals go.
IT has cooled since the boom of the early 2020s, but the market is alive. Portugal remains a convenient base for the tech hubs of international companies, and demand comes mainly from them — and mainly for narrow specialisations: cybersecurity, data, AI engineering.
After those come logistics and long-haul drivers, cooks and staff across tourism.
What Do People Actually Earn Here?
The first thing worth knowing: Portuguese employees are paid fourteen salaries a year, not twelve. The Labour Code provides for an additional holiday payment and a Christmas payment, each equal to one month’s pay. So your real income is about sixteen per cent higher than the monthly figure you were quoted.
The second: 11% of every payment goes to the social security contribution, and on top of that comes income tax on a progressive scale. The minimum wage is fully exempt from income tax; it stands at 920 euros.
In January 2026 the average rate across the construction sector was 1,414 euros gross — 8.4% more than a year earlier — or 1,300 euros net, if you spread fourteen salaries across twelve months. A civil engineer earns around 1,500 euros, a site foreman around 1,700.
IT salaries are not astronomical either, if you are working for a Portuguese employer. According to the Hays guide for 2026, the typical range for a specialist is 40,000–55,000 euros gross per year. That works out at roughly 2,300–2,500 euros net per month. For comparison: a German IT specialist takes home around 3,150 euros net a month, about a third more. Then again, the cost of living in Germany is a quarter higher — and there is no ocean.
What to Do With a Foreign Diploma
Not everyone needs to have their diploma recognised. If you are joining a private company in an ordinary role, for instance, the diploma itself plus an interview will do; no state procedure is involved. Official recognition is required in three cases: a competition for a public sector post, a regulated profession, and admission to a Portuguese university.
Higher education qualifications are recognised by DGES, the directorate-general for higher education, through the RecON platform. If your diploma has already been mapped to a Portuguese equivalent, the certificate is issued in about a month and a half; in all other cases the procedure runs through a university committee and takes up to 90 working days.
Regulated professions — doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects — are handled separately and not by DGES: the decision is taken by the relevant professional chamber, the ordem.
There is one practical conclusion. If you do need recognition, file the paperwork in advance, without waiting for a vacancy to appear. Ninety working days is around five calendar months, and a vacancy will have been filled three times over by then.
Where to Look for Vacancies
The state employment service, IEFP, runs the IEFPonline portal — the successor to Net Emprego, whose old address no longer opens. Registration is open to foreigners too: a non-EU citizen needs a document allowing them to live and work in Portugal. Registering gives you access to vacancies, courses and free vocational training, including Portuguese language classes. EU citizens also have the European EURES network running in parallel.
IEFP vacancies, though, are only the ones employers have registered with the state. A significant share of hiring happens elsewhere — through sector-specific job boards and recruiters. Here is where to look next.
General job boards. Net-Empregos is the country’s oldest and largest portal; the interface is archaic, but plenty of employers post nowhere else. Sapo Emprego and Expresso Emprego come next by volume, with a tidier presentation; Expresso also carries the occasional opening in Angola and Mozambique. Indeed and LinkedIn work the way they do everywhere, and their coverage of Portugal is good: for office professions LinkedIn is effectively mandatory here, because recruiters look there first.
If you don’t speak Portuguese yet. EnglishJobs.pt and Jobs in Lisbon list only roles where the working language is English. Worth keeping in mind separately: the multilingual support centres that international companies run in Lisbon and Porto value a second European language — German, French, Dutch — more than they value Portuguese.
IT. ITJobs.pt is the densest Portuguese tech board. Landing.jobs is geared towards international and relocation roles, and carries a lot of remote work.
Tourism, hotels, restaurants. Turijobs is the sector board, from front-line to director level: cooks, waiters, receptionists, floor managers.
Healthcare. The Emprego Saúde portal, for doctors, nurses, dentists and physiotherapists. Plus the sites of the large private networks — Luz Saúde, CUF, Lusíadas: they post directly, bypassing the aggregators.
Communications, design, media. Carga de Trabalhos is a niche board for marketing, advertising, journalism and audiovisual work. There are not many listings, which is an accurate portrait of these industries here — but the employers who post there are not to be found anywhere else.
Science and academia. EURAXESS, the European database of research positions, with a Portuguese section.
Public sector. Bolsa de Emprego Público (BEP), the official job exchange of state bodies. Bear in mind: recognition of your diploma is almost always required, and usually EU citizenship or a specific set of conditions.
Recruitment agencies. Hays, Michael Page, Randstad, Adecco, Manpower, Gi Group, Multitempo. They operate across the country and cover IT, finance, engineering, sales and customer support, and some of them factory and warehouse positions too. One thing that matters: an agency never takes money from a candidate. If you are being asked to pay to be placed in a job, you are not dealing with an agency. A further advantage: Hays and Michael Page publish free salary guides, so you can work out your own range before the interview.
Facebook groups. Organised by city — Lisbon, Porto, Faro, Coimbra. Plenty of listings in catering, cleaning, construction and elderly care. This is also the channel most often used for hiring without a contract, so check that the vacancy is real and that the employer is prepared to put you on the books.
Working Off the Books
Portugal is working to shrink its shadow economy and its undeclared labour market, but the numbers there are still high.
The number of fines for undeclared work has tripled in four years and, together with concealed contracts, is approaching eleven thousand cases. The leading sectors are agriculture, construction, hotels and restaurants, domestic work and retail — in other words, exactly the ones newcomers tend to enter. Around 35% of workers from non-EU countries hold low-skilled positions, against eight per cent across the population as a whole, and almost half of all foreign workers are doing jobs they are overqualified for.
Worth keeping in mind: working without a contract here is a dead end. Contributions are not paid, seniority does not accumulate, renewing a work-visa residence permit becomes impossible, and there is no way to complain if you are not paid. You may, in the moment, earn more.
What Kind of Contract Will You Be Offered?
The current Labour Code recognises two types. The open-ended contract, sem termo, is the default norm. The fixed-term contract, a termo, is permitted by law only for a company’s temporary needs: covering an absent employee, a seasonal surge, the launch of a new line of business. It cannot run longer than two years.
The main thing to ask about at the interview is the probation period. This is the stretch during which your employer can dismiss you with a single letter and no explanation. For an open-ended contract it is usually three months. But for those looking for their first job and for the long-term unemployed it can be six. Which means someone with no Portuguese employment record can legally be given a six-month probation period in an entirely ordinary role. That is a question to settle before you sign the contract, not after.
