New Eurostat figures show the ratio of house prices to household incomes rose by 6.8% across the European Union between 2015 and 2025 — and by 60.8% in Portugal alone, the largest increase of any EU country and almost nine times the bloc-wide figure, according to the European statistics agency’s data as reported by Portugal Resident.
Portugal’s outlier result puts real distance between it and the next-steepest increases: the Netherlands at 34.3%, Hungary at 26.5%, the Czech Republic at 25.8% and Spain at 24.5%. At the other end of the ranking, Romania recorded the largest decrease in the ratio, at -42.8%, followed by Finland (-25.2%) and Bulgaria (-16.2%) — meaning housing affordability measured against local incomes actually improved in those markets over the decade, even as it worsened sharply across most of the bloc.
The figures help explain why Portugal, more than most EU peers, has become a flashpoint for debate over foreign buyers and the Golden Visa programme: a near-61% divergence between what homes cost and what local households earn is a structural affordability problem, not a one-year price spike, and it is layered on top of rising construction costs — Portugal’s building costs rose 7.4% year on year in September, according to national statistics institute INE, driven in part by a 7.7% rise in labour costs amid a continuing shortage of construction workers.
For buyers weighing Portugal against the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic or Spain — all also showing meaningful affordability deterioration over the decade — the Eurostat data is a reminder that the price-to-income gap, not just the headline price, is the better measure of how stretched a market has become relative to where it started.
