Expats in Portugal: where the foreign residents actually live, from the register rather than the lists

The question behind every one of these searches is where to live. The usual answer is a list of six places written by someone selling property in them, and it names the Algarve, Cascais, Lisbon, Porto, Madeira and Lagos.

Portugal counts its foreign residents twice over, in two official series, and neither of them produces that list.

The short answer. At 31 December 2025 the statistics office, INE, puts the resident population at 11,424,031, of whom 1,597,539 are foreign nationals — 14.0%. The migration agency, AIMA, counting residence records at 31 December 2024, reports 1,543,697 foreign residents, of whom 1,096,170 held a valid residence title. By count, the municipalities with the most foreign residents are Lisboa (202,430), Sintra (96,587), Porto (58,161), Cascais (56,185), Amadora (55,573), Loures (51,834) and Odivelas (51,032) — nine of the top twelve are in the Lisbon metropolitan area and hold 614,486 between them, 39.8% of all foreign residents. By share of the local population, the ranking inverts: the Algarve is the region with the highest proportion of foreign residents at 27.9%, ahead of Greater Lisbon at 22.6%. And Americans number 19,258 — fewer than Italians, Chinese, French, Germans or Spaniards.

How many foreigners live in Portugal: 1,597,539 at the end of 2025, or 14.0%

The figure comes from INE's Estimativas de População Residente, the 2025 edition released on 22 June 2026, and it refers to the position at 31 December 2025.

• Resident population: 11,424,031 — 5,587,729 men and 5,836,302 women.
• Foreign nationals among them: 1,597,539, which the release puts at 14.0% of the total.

That is the number to use for "how many expats live in Portugal", with one caveat this page will not skip: it counts foreign nationals, so it includes everyone from a Brazilian construction worker to a retired German, and excludes a foreign-born person who has naturalised. The word "expat" has no statistical definition in either series, and nothing published by either body distinguishes the people the English-language guides mean from the rest.

Where expats in Portugal actually live: the twelve municipalities with the most foreign residents

This table is the answer to the question most of these searches are really asking, and it comes from AIMA's Relatório de Migrações e Asilo 2024, published in October 2025, at the reference date 31 December 2024.

Nine of those twelve are in the Lisbon metropolitan area, and together they hold 614,486 foreign residents — 39.8% of the national total. Widen it to districts and AIMA reports that Lisboa, Faro, Setúbal and Porto together account for 1,100,670, or 71.3% of all foreign residents.

Now compare that table with the lists. Sintra, Amadora, Loures, Odivelas, Almada and Seixal — six of the twelve — appear on essentially no English-language ranking of where to live in Portugal. They are the Lisbon commuter belt, and they are where a third of the country's foreign residents live.

Only one Algarve municipality, Loulé, makes the top twelve, at 29,578 — fewer than Amadora.

Why the Algarve tops every expat list and still is not where most foreigners live

Both answers are correct, because they answer different questions, and conflating them is the single most common error in this subject.

• Count: how many foreign residents live in a place. The Lisbon metropolitan area wins, overwhelmingly.
• Share: what proportion of a place's population is foreign. Here the Algarve leads, with 27.9% of its residents foreign nationals on INE's 2025 estimates, ahead of Greater Lisbon at 22.6% and the Setúbal Peninsula at 18.3%.

So the Algarve is the region where a foreigner is least likely to feel like a minority, and the Lisbon belt is where the largest number of foreigners actually are. If what you want is a place where a quarter of your neighbours are also foreign, the share figure is the one to read. If what you want is where the infrastructure for newcomers has grown up around the largest numbers, the count is.

What neither figure tells you is which foreigners. The Algarve's 27.9% and Amadora's 55,573 are not the same population, and the series do not break the regional shares down by nationality.

The two official counts of foreign residents in Portugal disagree, and both are official

At the same date, 31 December 2024, the two series give:

• AIMA: 1,543,697 foreign residents.
• INE: 1,538,426 foreign residents, in the new series published with the 2025 estimates.

A difference of 5,271. It is small against a million and a half, and it matters anyway, because it means a figure quoted without its source cannot be checked. The two bodies are counting different things: AIMA counts residence records, and reports separately that 1,096,170 of its 1,543,697 held a valid residence title, with the balance made up of temporary protection, pending applications, expired titles and other categories. INE estimates a resident population.

Our reading, labelled as such: for "how many foreigners live in Portugal" the INE estimate is the one to quote, because it is a population estimate on a consistent demographic basis. For "how many hold a residence permit" the AIMA figure of 1,096,170 is the one, and it is 447,527 lower than the headline number that circulates. A guide that reports AIMA's 1.54 million as the number of permit holders is wrong by nearly half a million, and several do.

Where American expats in Portugal live, and how few of them there are

This is the part of the subject where the English-language content and the register diverge furthest.

At 31 December 2024 AIMA records 19,258 residents of the United States of America. For scale, from the same annex:

Brazil alone is 484,596, which AIMA puts at 31.4% of all foreign residents. The United States is 19,258 — about 1.2% of the total, and smaller than Italy, China, France, Germany and Spain. Canada is 2,876.

Which is why this page cannot give you a table of American expat communities by municipality: neither series publishes municipality figures broken down by nationality, so the places where those 19,258 people actually live are not in the published data. Anyone who gives you that list is giving you an impression. The honest version of the answer is that the American population of Portugal is small enough that in most municipalities it would not form a visible community at all, and that the places most often named to Americans — Cascais, Lisbon, the Algarve — are named because that is where the agents are, not because the register says so.

If you are moving from the United States, the question that actually changes your finances is the treaty position, and the saving clause makes it different from every other origin on this site: moving to Portugal from the US. The British case, where a new convention replaced the 1968 one in 2025, is in moving to Portugal from the UK — and the UK's 48,238 residents are two and a half times the American figure.

What the register does not tell you about living in these places

A count of residents is not a recommendation, and this is where the data stops.

• It does not tell you what the place costs. What the Portuguese state's own statistics say about living costs is in the cost of living in Portugal.
• It does not tell you what property costs, or what you will be charged. The median transaction price per square metre by municipality, and the finding that buyers with tax residence outside Portugal paid 47.0% more per square metre than domestic buyers in Greater Lisbon, are in the housing market and mortgage rates. That premium is the single most useful number to carry into a decision about where to buy, and it is the reason to compare an asking price against the municipal median rather than against a portal's average.
• It does not tell you whether you can live there. Which residence route you qualify for is a separate question with its own gates: relocating to Portugal.
• It does not cover the islands on the same terms. Madeira and the Azores are autonomous regions with their own land regimes, in the Azores and Madeira.

The municipality percentages in circulation, and why this page does not print them

Figures for the share of foreign residents in individual municipalities are widely reported — around half the population in Odemira, figures in the forties for Albufeira and Lagos, thirty per cent for Lisboa.

We did not find the series they come from. AIMA's report gives municipalities as absolute counts only; the one percentage it ties to municipalities is the aggregate 39.8% for the nine Lisbon-area municipalities in its top twelve. INE's 2025 release gives shares by region — the 27.9%, 22.6% and 18.3% above — and publishes no municipality breakdown in the document we read.

So this page gives counts by municipality and shares by region, and prints no municipality share. The numbers in circulation may well be right and come from a table we have not reached; until we have read it, publishing them would make this page exactly what it is trying to replace.

How to use these numbers when choosing where to live in Portugal

1. Decide which question you are asking. "Where do most foreigners live" and "where are foreigners the largest share of the population" have different answers — the Lisbon belt and the Algarve — and only one of them is yours.
2. Check the count for the specific municipality, not the region. Loulé at 29,578 and Amadora at 55,573 are both "popular with foreigners", in completely different ways.
3. Read the price data for that municipality before the lifestyle content. The median per square metre and the non-resident premium are published; the atmosphere is not.
4. Discount the nationality assumption. If you are American, the register says there are 19,258 of you in the country. Plan for a place you would like rather than for a community the data cannot confirm exists.

Frequently asked questions about expats in Portugal

Where each part of this is proved

The resident population, the foreign share and the regional shares come from INE's Estimativas de População Residente 2025, released 22 June 2026, at the reference date 31 December 2025. The register counts — the total, the residence-title figure, the municipalities and the nationalities — come from AIMA's Relatório de Migrações e Asilo 2024, published October 2025, at the reference date 31 December 2024. Both are on the sources page with the date we read them. Costs: the cost of living in Portugal. Prices and the non-resident premium: the housing market. Routes to residence: relocating to Portugal and the D7 and residency page. After arrival: after the permit. Origin-specific tax: from the US, from the UK. The islands: the Azores, Madeira.