Portugal Rental Yield Index 2026

How to read this index

Gross yield answers one question: how much annual rent does a euro of purchase price buy, before any cost of ownership. It is the right number for comparing municipalities against each other, because both inputs come from the same official source with the same window, and the biases cancel. It is the wrong number for projecting your bank balance: IMI, condominium charges, insurance, maintenance, management and vacancy all come out of it, and as a rule of thumb a realistic net figure runs one to two percentage points lower.

The pattern the table shows has held for years, but the size of the spread is the story. The cheapest thirds of the country rent back at 8% to 11% gross, while prime coastal municipalities pay 3% to 4%. Buying in Loulé at a 3.5% gross yield is a price-appreciation bet with a rental subsidy; buying in Setúbal or Coimbra at 5.1% is a genuine income play at mainstream liquidity. Neither is wrong, but they are different products, and the index makes the trade visible one municipality at a time.

Why new-lease rents, and what that means

The rent input covers new lease agreements only, as registered with the Autoridade Tributária and compiled by INE under its 2026 methodology. New-lease rents run above the rents of ongoing contracts, some of which are decades old and rent-controlled, so this index reads as the yield available to a buyer letting at today's market rent, not the average yield of every existing landlord. It also counts long-term residential leases, not licensed short-lets: an Alojamento Local operation in Albufeira can gross more than the 4.3% shown here, at the cost of licensing, management fees, seasonality and regulatory risk.

The thin-market warning on high yields

The highest computed yields in the file, Vila Nova de Paiva at 11.8%, São João da Pesqueira at 11.6%, Manteigas at 11.0%, are interior municipalities where a year of new leases fits in a school hall. The medians are official, but a single large landlord or a dozen contracts can move them, and reselling the asset later is slow. We publish them because they are real INE data, and we flag them because a yield you cannot exit is not the same product as a yield in Braga. INE itself suppresses municipalities with too few observations to publish at all, which is why 61 of 308 municipalities are absent from the file.

Putting it together

Start from the gross yield here, subtract IMI at 0.3% to 0.45% of the taxable value from the Autoridade Tributária's municipal IMI tables, then condominium, insurance, maintenance and management, and you have a defensible net projection for any municipality on the list. The purchase-side taxes and fees that come before any of this are in the Foreign Buyer Cost Index, and the full buying process is in the complete Portugal buyer guide. Portugal Property Invest is an independent advisory and referrer: we connect foreign buyers to licensed Portuguese lawyers and lenders, and we do not provide legal services or hold an AMI agency licence ourselves.

Sources

• Statistics Portugal (INE), indicator 0014696, median house rental value of new lease agreements of dwellings in the last 12 months (2026 Methodology, €/m²), quarterly, 12 months ended Q1 2026, published 26 June 2026. ine.pt
• Statistics Portugal (INE), indicator 0012234, median value of dwellings sales in the last 12 months (Methodology 2022, €/m²), Total category, quarterly, 12 months ended Q1 2026, published 17 July 2026. ine.pt
• Gross yield column: computed by Portugal Property Invest as annualised median rent divided by median sale price, per geography. Neither INE series publishes this ratio. Marked computed in the CSV, method on the methodology page.
• Autoridade Tributária, Taxas de IMI, municipal IMI rate tables, referenced for the gross-to-net adjustment. portaldasfinancas.gov.pt