Tourism's Share of Portugal's GDP and Employment: 8.1%, 11.8%, 16.1% or 21.3%, and Which One to Quote

Four numbers for one economy

A tourism satellite account exists because tourism is not an industry in the national accounts. Hotels are, and restaurants are, but a restaurant in Lisbon's Baixa serves visitors and office workers from the same kitchen. INE's account starts from demand. It estimates what visitors spend on each product, then works out how much of each industry's output that spending buys. A hotel's output is 98.3% tourism on INE's 2023 tables, a restaurant's 47.2%, road transport's 42.2% and cultural services' 23.9%.

From that starting point INE publishes three ratios. Tourism consumption (consumo turístico no território económico) was €49,350M in 2025, 16.1% of GDP. That figure includes the full price of everything visitors bought, including imported goods and the inputs other industries supplied, so it overstates tourism's own output. Direct tourism GVA (VABGT) strips those out and leaves the value tourism-characteristic businesses added: €21,473M, 8.1% of GVA. Direct plus indirect GDP, which INE calculates with input-output multipliers, adds the value created by suppliers such as food wholesalers and laundries: €36,169M, 11.8% of GDP, or €30,358M and 11.4% measured as GVA.

The pattern matters because public figures blur them. ECO's headline on the August release read 'Turismo vale 16,1% do PIB', which describes the consumption ratio as tourism's value. AICEP's Portugal Global put the €36.2bn next to the 16.1%. In January 2026 the Secretary of State for Tourism told a conference that tourism was 14% of GDP directly and 16% with indirect effects; in February he said about 12% directly and up to 20% with related activity. Turismo de Portugal told SOL in October 2026 that tourism represents 'more than 12% of GDP', the previous vintage's figure. None of these statements matches the current satellite account.

For most purposes the direct GVA share is the one to quote. It is the measure Eurostat uses to compare countries, it does not double-count other industries, and it moves with what tourism businesses actually earn. The 11.8% is defensible when the question is how much activity depends on visitors, provided the word 'indirect' travels with it. The consumption ratio is useful for one thing: tracking whether visitor spending is growing faster than the economy. It should never be described as a share of GDP.

A rebase that cut a point

The current numbers are lower than the ones Portugal was using two years ago. In August 2024 INE's satellite account, then on a 2016 base, estimated tourism's direct GVA at €21,051M in 2023, 9.1% of GVA, and direct plus indirect GDP at 12.7%. In August 2025 INE moved the account to a 2021 base, following the national accounts rebase of September 2024. The same year became €18,880M and 8.1%. The 2022 share fell from 8.6% to 7.6%.

INE's own revision table shows direct GVA cut by €2,000M for 2022 and €2,171M for 2023, about one percentage point each year, while the consumption share barely moved (−0.2 and +0.1 points). The reasons it gives are a new balance-of-payments series, the 2022/23 household budget survey, the 2021 census (which lowered the imputed rent of second homes), e-invoice data, a larger GDP denominator and the exclusion of international students staying more than a year from visitor spending. That last change means INE's 2019 figure for inbound tourism consumption (€21,187M, base 2016) and its 2023 figure (€28,686M, base 2021) are not on the same footing, a point our own earlier tracking missed.

The rebase did not change the story of the decade, which the time series below shows. Tourism's direct share roughly doubled from about 4% in the late 2000s to 8.1% in 2019, collapsed to 4.4% in 2020 and recovered to 8.1% by 2023. It changed the level at which the recovery is measured. On the old base, 2023 looked like a new record above 2019. On the new base it is a return to the 2019 share.

The plateau is the more important finding. In euros the satellite account still grows: direct GVA rose 5.6% in 2025 and consumption reached a nominal record. But nominal GDP rose 5.9%, faster than tourism consumption (+4.9%), and the share held only because tourism's value added kept pace. INE's estimate of tourism's contribution to real GDP growth fell from 3.6 points in 2022 (of 7.0%) to 1.2 in 2023, 0.4 in 2024 and 0.3 in 2025 (of 1.9%). The post-pandemic catch-up that made tourism the engine of growth is over. Our annual statistics report found the same thing from the demand side: foreign nights grew 0.6% in 2025, and Banco de Portugal's receipts grew 5.0% in nominal terms.

Banco de Portugal reached the same view from the export side. A box in its October 2025 Economic Bulletin found that Portugal's share of world tourism exports rose 39.2% between 2014 and 2019 but only 11.6% between 2019 and 2024, and the bank's projections assume tourism exports grow about 2.5% a year in 2025–2027 with no further share gains.

What the 8.1% is made of

INE's detailed tables, which run to 2023, show how concentrated tourism's value added is. Hotels and other accommodation produced €6,645M of the €19,011M direct total, restaurants €3,680M, air transport about €1,000M, road transport €692M and car and equipment rental €651M. One line has no workers at all: €1,484M is the imputed rent of second homes used for holidays, which national accounts treat as output whether or not the owner is Portuguese. INE lowered that line when it brought in the 2021 census, one of the reasons the rebase reduced the share.

On the demand side, visitors from abroad accounted for €28,686M of the €44,028M of tourism consumption in 2023, 65.2%, and residents travelling inside Portugal for €13,394M, 30.4%. Spending on accommodation (€11,990M) and restaurants (€10,575M) was larger than on passenger transport (€7,686M). Inbound tourism consumption was equivalent to 22.5% of Portugal's exports of goods and services, which is why the receipts line in the balance of payments carries so much weight in the current account.

The account now also reports an environmental side. In 2023 air transport, accommodation and travel agencies produced 3.6% of GVA but 13.2% of fossil carbon dioxide emissions and 24.5% of nitrogen oxide emissions. Tourism's share of output and its share of emissions are measured on different scopes, but the gap between them is large enough to matter for any discussion of carbon pricing on flights.

How many jobs: 339,000, 404,000, 546,000 or 1.17 million

Employment produces an even wider range, because each source answers a different question. The Labour Force Survey asks people where they work. In 2025 it counted 338,700 people aged 15 to 74 in accommodation and food services (NACE I), 6.5% of employment, of whom 93,600 worked in accommodation and 245,100 in food and beverage. The national accounts count jobs located in Portugal, including second jobs and workers the survey misses, and give 404,000 persons in the same industry in 2025, 7.5% of the total.

INE's satellite account counts all tourism-characteristic industries, which adds transport, travel agencies, car rental, culture and sport: 545,755 full-time equivalents in 2023, 10.4% of employment, or 658,540 jobs. That count includes every waiter in every restaurant, whether the customer is a visitor or not. INE also estimates the share of that employment that tourism demand actually pays for: 310,861 FTE, about 57% of the total and roughly 5.9% of national employment (derived from INE's 10.4% share).

WTTC's 1,165,446 jobs for 2024, 22.9% of employment, adds supplier and induced jobs to a direct figure of 568,507, which is close to INE's. WTTC's own wording has moved from 'one in five' to 'nearly 23%' to 'one in four' for 2025, so the familiar 'one in five jobs' now matches neither WTTC nor INE.

The survey also shows how seasonal the work is. Accommodation and food employment rose from 314,800 in the first quarter of 2025 to 361,200 in the third, a 14.7% swing (derived), and reached 354,800 in the second quarter of 2026, 5.7% more than a year earlier (derived). Temporary contracts have become less common: 23.6% of employees in the sector held one in 2025, down from 34.7% in 2019, though still above the 15.2% average. In the Algarve the swing shows up in the unemployment register. In February 2025 the region's 11,182 registered unemployed from hotels and restaurants were half of all its registered unemployed, and in November 2025 Algarve registrations jumped 58.8% in a month while national unemployment fell.

Lower pay, lower output per hour, and a third of the workforce foreign

Tourism jobs pay less than the average job, by an amount that depends on the definition. INE's satellite account puts average pay in tourism-characteristic industries at €25,700 in 2023, 92.8% of the €27,700 national average, up from 89.0% in 2021. That group includes airlines and travel agencies, which raise the average. In the narrower accommodation and food industry, national accounts give wages and salaries of €21,391 per employee in 2025, 84.4% of the economy's €25,359 (derived), or about €1,528 a month over fourteen payments. Pordata's figures from the Quadros de Pessoal put the sector's average monthly earnings at €978 in 2022, the lowest of any sector.

The minimum wage does much of the work. A Banco de Portugal study published in March 2025 found 41.5% of accommodation and food workers on the minimum wage in 2022, about 125,000 people, against 22.8% across the economy and 28.5% in the sector in 2015. The minimum wage has risen from €600 in 2019 to €920 in 2026, 53.3% in seven years, and the hotel and restaurant collective agreements signed for 2026 add about 5% on average. Average hotel room rates rose 39.6% between 2019 and 2025 on INE's data, less than the 45% rise in the minimum wage over the same years (€600 to €870, derived).

Productivity follows the same pattern. Accommodation and food produced €41,075 of GVA per person employed in 2025 against €49,622 for the whole economy, 82.8%, and €19.55 per hour worked against €25.95, 75.4% (both derived from Eurostat national accounts). Per hour, the gap has narrowed since 2019, when the sector produced 66.9% of the average. By European standards the Portuguese sector is not unusually weak. Across the EU accommodation and food produce 57.3% of the average output per person, and in Greece 52.4%. Portuguese hotels and restaurants produce close to the EU average for the industry per worker (€40,700 against €42,300 in 2024). It is the rest of the Portuguese economy that sits further below its EU peers.

Much of the workforce now comes from abroad. Banco de Portugal's analysis of Social Security records found 93,300 foreign employees in accommodation and food in 2023, 31.1% of the sector's employees and the highest share of any industry. By December 2025 the Ministry of Labour's dashboard counted 129,000 foreign contributors in the sector, out of more than 840,000 foreign contributors in all industries. Because one figure is an annual average and the other a December count, the two cannot be read as a growth rate. The dependence makes the sector sensitive to how fast residence permits are processed, the subject of our AIMA backlog tracker.

Second in Europe on the comparable measure

Eurostat's 2026 edition of its tourism satellite account publication compares direct tourism GVA across member states. In 2022, the latest common year, Croatia led at 10.5%, Portugal was second at 7.6%, Spain third at 6.0% and Italy fourth at 5.4% (2023), against an EU average of 3.6%. Portugal's 8.1% for 2023 is about 2.25 times the 2022 EU average (derived; the years differ). On the consumption ratio INE reports Portugal second in Europe after Iceland for 2024.

Two comparisons complicate the ranking. On the narrower national-accounts measure, accommodation and food as a share of GVA, Portugal (6.3% in 2024) ranks fourth in the EU behind Greece (7.5%), Croatia (7.0%) and Spain (6.5%), and its share has barely moved since 2019 (6.1%). And on direct plus indirect effects Spain's INE reports 12.4% of GDP for 2023 and 12.6% for 2024, above Portugal's 11.9%, although Spain's direct share is lower. The two accounts use different indirect methods, so their indirect figures should be compared with care, and neither should be set beside the other's direct share.

Greece, the obvious comparator, has not submitted a satellite account to Eurostat. The '13% of GDP direct contribution' published by the INSETE institute for 2023 is calculated from tourism receipts and cannot be compared with Portugal's 8.1%. WTTC runs above official direct figures everywhere it can be checked: for Portugal its 21.3% total is about 2.6 times INE's direct share and about 1.8 times its direct-plus-indirect share; for Spain its 15.3% (2025) is about 2.5 times Spain's direct share. WTTC also re-estimates history in each edition. Its estimate of Portugal's 2019 total contribution moved from €40.1bn in its 2023 report to €45.5bn in its 2025 report.

The regions that depend on visitors

No official measure of tourism's share exists for any mainland region. INE's account is national, Madeira's regional statistics office last published a regional satellite account for 2019, and the Azores have only academic estimates. The closest comparable proxy is Eurostat's regional accounts, which split GVA into broad industry groups. The relevant group, trade, transport, accommodation and food (NACE G–I), overstates tourism because it includes every supermarket and lorry, but it ranks the regions consistently.

The Algarve stands apart. Trade, transport, accommodation and food produced 40.4% of its GVA in 2023 and employed 38.6% of its workers, against 23.3% and 25.1% nationally. The regional development agency's figures put accommodation and food alone at €2,850M in 2023, about 24.8% of the region's GVA (derived), four times the national share. Add real estate, partly driven by holiday homes and short-term rentals, and those three industries make up just over half of regional GVA. That is the source of claims that tourism is 'two-thirds' of the Algarve's economy. We found no study that supports a figure that high. A careful satellite account for the region would probably fall somewhere between 25% and 40%, which still makes the Algarve Portugal's most tourism-dependent region.

Madeira is second on the regional proxy at 34.3%, and the only region with an official satellite account. DREM's account for 2019 put tourism's direct GVA at €723.1M, 16.2% of regional GVA, twice the national share, with 17.0% of employment in tourism-characteristic activities. The often-quoted '28.8% of Madeira's GDP' is the consumption ratio. A DN Madeira fact-check published on 6 October 2026 confirmed that no newer account exists, despite a 12.2% rise in airport traffic in 2025. The Azores sit at 27.3% on the proxy. A 2018 University of the Azores working paper estimated tourism's direct GVA at 8.46% of the region's in 2016; a 2022 dissertation cites regional statistics office estimates of 8.6% to 9.8% for 2016–2018, which we could not verify.

Grande Lisboa's 23.2% is close to the national average, even though the municipality of Lisbon took 18% of Portugal's overnight stays in 2025. Lisbon's economy is large enough that tourism is one industry among many; a government fact sheet on the municipality lists call centres, consultancy and IT among the largest employers, with restaurants eighth and hotels eleventh. In Albufeira, by contrast, twelve of the fifteen largest activity codes by employment are in accommodation, food and travel agencies. No municipal value-added series exists to measure that dependence directly.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers see the employment side of these numbers more than the GDP side. The 14.7% seasonal swing in hotel and restaurant jobs and the 50% share of the Algarve's unemployed who come from the sector in winter mean that a February trip meets a smaller workforce, shorter opening hours in resort towns and more closures, while Lisbon, Porto and Madeira run close to year-round. About one in three hotel and restaurant employees is foreign, and the sector's wages average about 84% of the national figure. If you are planning a route that mixes city and coast, our Portugal itinerary guide sets out routes that combine both.

Tourism businesses and investors should treat the plateau as the new baseline. Tourism's direct share has been 8.1% for three years and its contribution to growth has shrunk to 0.3 points, so further gains have to come from price and product mix now that the volume catch-up is over. The binding cost is labour: the minimum wage rose 53% between 2019 and 2026, 41.5% of the sector's workers were on it in 2022, and 31% of employees are foreign. Any model that assumes a wage bill growing with inflation, or uninterrupted access to immigrant labour, is likely to be wrong. The thresholds that would change this reading are a direct share above 8.5% on the current base, a sector productivity ratio above 90% of the economy, or a foreign share of employees falling back toward the economy-wide 17.6%.

Journalists and analysts can cite these figures safely: tourism's direct GVA was 8.1% of Portugal's GVA in 2023, 2024 and 2025 (INE, August 2026); direct plus indirect effects were 11.8% of GDP in 2025; tourism-characteristic industries employed 545,755 FTE, 10.4% of employment, in 2023; Portugal ranked second in the EU on direct tourism GVA in 2022 (Eurostat, 7.6%). Do not repeat '20% of GDP', 'one job in five', 'tourism is worth 16.1% of GDP', 'more than 12% of GDP' for 2025, or any share of the Algarve's GDP above 40%. The series finding this article adds is that Portugal has no official tourism share for any mainland region, any municipality or any year after 2019 in Madeira. Every regional dependence figure in circulation is a proxy or a guess.