Meanwhile, AIMA has published its 2025 Migration Report. As of December 31, Portugal was home to 1,585,854 foreign nationals — just 2.7% more than a year earlier. In 2024, their number grew by 18.3%, and in 2023 by 31.4%. Growth has not been this slow since at least 2017, as the report does not provide earlier figures.
Foreign nationals account for 14% of Portugal’s population. That is a significant share, but not a record: in Austria, for example, they make up 19.5% of the population, while in Cyprus they account for around a quarter. By this measure, Portugal is roughly on a par with Germany and Spain.
The government is pleased with the result. Secretary of State for Migration Rui Armindo Freitas described the figures as a “clear turnaround” and the result of a policy that leaves only legal routes into the country, governed by clear rules. The tightening is also visible in other indicators: 23,133 notices to leave voluntarily were issued over the year — these are given to people who have no legal grounds to remain in the country — compared with 446 a year earlier. The number of new residence permits issued through family reunification fell by 61.3% over two years.
It is still too early to say that people have stopped moving to Portugal. The report counts people with documents and pending applications, rather than arrivals: as AIMA itself acknowledges, the date a residence permit is issued often does not coincide with the date a person arrived in the country. In addition, the agency spent the year correcting and cleaning up its database, so part of the slowdown may turn out to be statistical.
English-speaking communities, meanwhile, show different trends.
English-speaking countries
There are around 81,500 citizens of the UK, US, Ireland, South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand living in Portugal, with more than half of them British. The British community shrank in 2025: there were 47,726 British nationals, compared with 48,238 a year earlier — a 1.1% decline.
Figures for Americans, Irish and Canadians for 2025 have not yet been published. At the end of 2024, there were 19,258 US citizens in Portugal, and they were issued almost 5,000 new residence permits that year — more than British nationals received.
The actual figures are higher. AIMA counts people by passport, so those from these countries who have acquired Portuguese citizenship or citizenship of another EU country are no longer included in the figures.
