Portugal's Tourism Labour Shortage: 15,000 and 40,000 'Missing' Workers Against 3,500–7,100 Measured Vacancies

Eight shortage claims, tested

The table below sets the claims that circulate beside the evidence. The oldest and most repeated is the Hotels Association's. On 10 November 2021 its president, Raul Martins, said that about 15,000 workers were missing from Portuguese hotels. The basis was a member survey with about 60% response, in which roughly 400 hotels with 35,000 rooms reported 7,200 vacancies, scaled up by proportion to the country's roughly 1,200 hotels. Observador noted at the time that the arithmetic was not shown. Straight scaling of 7,200 from 400 hotels to 1,200 gives about 21,600 (derived), so the published figure does not follow from the published inputs. In June 2026 the association told Sol that it has no updated figure and that the sector needs tens of thousands of workers.

The restaurant association's number is older and looser. On 21 November 2021 AHRESP's secretary-general, Ana Jacinto, said that more than 40,000 workers were missing from hotels and restaurants, and no method was given. The figure reappeared unchanged in Sol in April 2024, and RTP in May 2024 described it as an estimate from 2022. The World Travel & Tourism Council went further in December 2021, forecasting that 85,000 travel and tourism jobs would stay unfilled in Portugal that year and that the shortfall would average 53,000 in 2022. That is a modelled forecast for the whole travel and tourism economy, and the model is not described on the WTTC page.

The Algarve has the best-documented case and the most distorted headline. The University of the Algarve and the hotel association AHETA surveyed members in 2022 and found that hotels would need between 4,484 and 7,906 more workers by the end of 2023, on a base of about 17,000 employees. The headline rounded the top of the range to 8,000. In May 2025 a regional news site attributed to AHETA's president a need for more than 100,000 workers. We found no primary report of that statement. It would equal almost 30% of national employment in accommodation and food (derived), and it contradicts the association's own study.

Two further claims belong in the panel because officials repeat them. A secretary of state put tourism at about 20% of GDP in 2024 without a source; the Tourism Satellite Account gives 8.1% of gross value added and 11.8% of GDP including indirect effects, as set out in our article on tourism's share of GDP and employment. And the claim that foreigners fill most hospitality jobs fails on the only published sector share, 31.1% in 2023.

One correction is ours. Our planning notes paired the foreign-worker share with a foreign median pay of €769 to €781 a month, against €902 to €945 for Portuguese nationals, as though the gap described hospitality. Banco de Portugal's slides give those numbers for all sectors in 2023 and carry no sector wage. The notes also held 22.8% as the share of the whole economy on the minimum wage, where Banco de Portugal coverage says 23%.

What Eurostat counts, and what it cannot

Eurostat's quarterly job-vacancy series is the only harmonised count. For accommodation and food in Portugal it ran from 456 in the first quarter of 2021, the pandemic trough, to a peak of 7,135 in the third quarter of 2022, and then settled. The four quarters of 2025 read 4,673, 4,855, 3,547 and 3,781, a mean of about 4,200 (derived). The vacancy rate fell from 2.9% at the 2022 peak to 1.3% in the last quarter of 2025, and it sat below the EU rate in every quarter we checked.

On the annual average, Portugal's accommodation and food vacancy rate was 1.5% in both 2024 and 2025, down from 2.5% in 2022. That is below France, Greece, Italy and Croatia and below the EU average of 2.7% in 2025. Spain reads 0.6%, but Spain's survey is known to capture few vacancies, so it should not be ranked against Portugal. Greece's 8.0% in 2024 looks like an outlier that we did not check against the quarterly series.

Three cautions apply. The survey counts posts that firms report as open and actively being filled, so a role the firm has stopped trying to fill does not appear. Coverage looks partial for Portugal, as shown above. And the data end in the fourth quarter of 2025, so there is no 2026 reading. A rate below the EU's does not show that Portugal has no problem. It shows that the problem is not visible as an unusually high number of open posts, and that the loudest claims cannot be reproduced from any public series.

Employment tells a different story from the claims. Portugal's labour force survey counted 321,700 people in accommodation and food in 2019 and averaged 338,700 across the four quarters of 2025 (derived), 6.5% of employment. INE data on Turismo de Portugal's TravelBI site give 341,000 for 2025, up 7.2% on 2024. We could not resolve the gap between 338,700 and 341,000, which looks like a basis difference. On either figure a sector described as unable to hire has added about 17,000 to 19,000 jobs since 2019.

The seasonal swing is large. Employment rose by 46,400 between the first and third quarters of 2025, 14.7% of the first-quarter level (derived), and the first quarter of 2026 started 8.2% above the first quarter of 2025. The pattern fits a rising year-round base with a seasonal layer on top. The household survey cannot prove that, and it counts only residents.

A sector built on the minimum wage

Employers and unions agree on little, but both point at pay. The national minimum wage rose from €600 a month in 2019 to €920 in 2026, paid 14 times a year, by Decreto-Lei 139/2025 in force from 1 January 2026. In accommodation and food, Banco de Portugal found 41.5% of workers on exactly the minimum in 2022, up from 28.5% in 2015. That is the highest share of any sector and the largest increase. The whole-economy share was 23%. DN reported about 125,000 sector workers on the minimum, a number we did not find in the Banco de Portugal report itself.

Average pay in the sector was €1,145 a month per job position in 2025 against €1,686 for the economy, 67.9% of the economy figure (derived). Hourly labour cost, which includes employer contributions, was €12.90 against €20.90 for the EU27, 61.7% of the EU level (derived). The 2026 collective agreements raised the AHP hotel pay tables by an average of more than 5% and the AHRESP restaurant tables by about 5%, above the 4.6% benchmark in the social concertation. The lowest cell in the AHP table is €920, which is the minimum wage. Every minimum-wage rise therefore compresses the pay ladder from the bottom. The October 2024 agreement points to €970 in 2027 and €1,020 in 2028. Our RevPAR and ADR article shows the revenue side of the same sector, where price built most of the gain since 2019.

Employers and the union federation read the pay data in opposite directions. An EY-Parthenon study commissioned by AHRESP and published on 1 October 2026 puts the net margin of restaurants at 3.0% against 8.2% for the economy, and productivity at about 60% of the national average. That supports the employers' case that margins leave little room for pay, and it is their own commissioned study. The federation FESAHT argues that the shortage comes from pay, hours and living conditions, and on 21 and 22 October 2026 it protested at the AHRESP congress in Lagoa. Turnover is the missing number. The 2026 Tourism Talent Report found 42% of surveyed firms citing staff turnover, from a sample of 111 companies at tourism recruitment fairs, but no official separation rate exists.

Housing is the other constraint every employer names. AHETA's president has called affordable housing the first problem and proposed a land bank for staff housing, and Vila Galé's Rosário Ribeiro told an Albufeira panel in July 2025 that staff accommodation was the biggest challenge. Two private projects were announced in 2023: €9 million for an 80-bed unit at Verdelago in Castro Marim, and a €15 million first phase for 200 people in the Comporta area. No national count of staff beds exists. Our Lisbon housing article covers the rent side in the capital.

A third of the workforce is foreign, and the sector figure is two years old

Banco de Portugal's June 2024 Fórum Economia slides, built on Social Security microdata, counted 93,300 foreign employees in accommodation and food in 2023. That was the second-largest sector by number after administrative and support activities (95,700) and ahead of construction (69,200), and 31.1% of the sector's employment. Across the economy, foreign employees rose from 55,600 in 2014 (2.1% of employees) to 495,200 in 2023 (13.4%). Brazilians were 209,400, or 42.3%, and India, Nepal and Bangladesh together 17.5%. Foreign workers supplied 9.3 percentage points of the 13% growth in employees between 2019 and 2023.

The newer figure does not extend that series. The labour ministry's December 2025 snapshot counted 129,000 foreign workers in accommodation and restaurants, the most of any sector, out of about 840,000 foreign contributors (17.6%). Observador's February 2026 count of foreign contributors over the whole of 2025 is 1,115,541, or 20.15%. The two totals differ because one is a cumulative year and the other a December stock, and nobody has published the sector denominator for December 2025. We therefore do not extend 31.1% to 2025. The only derived figure we offer is that 129,000 is about 15.4% of all foreign contributors, which says where foreign workers go, not what share of the sector they are.

Banco de Portugal's March 2026 bulletin adds the inflow view. Of roughly 1.4 million immigrant entries between 2010 and 2024, 18% had their first job in accommodation and food, second only to administrative and support activities at 20%. By origin, 38% were Brazilian, about 19% South Asian and about 14% from the Portuguese-speaking African countries. A 2023 to 2024 survey of 499 Algarve tourism workers by the hotel association and the University of the Algarve found that 47.8% were mostly young Brazilians and 43.9% young single people from Brazil, India and Nepal, with 8.3% highly qualified Europeans. That is a survey sample, not a census.

The regional picture is uneven. Banco de Portugal data reported by Postal put foreign workers at 36% of employees in Albufeira, across all sectors, though the reference year was not stated. In Madeira, Segurança Social data reported by DNoticias show foreign contributors rising from 1,900 in 2015 to 11,261 in 2025. New registrations peaked at 4,628 in 2023 and fell to 1,858 in 2025, a 30% drop from 2,656 in 2024 (derived), so the stock is at a record while the flow has slowed. At the 2024 Madeira Hotel Congress, Pestana said its staff came from 40 nationalities in 2023 against at most ten foreign workers in 2019, and that it needed 1,500 workers for the summer. Our foreign resident population article explains why the stock counts differ by source.

The season: unemployment in winter, vacancies in summer

The Algarve shows the seasonal mismatch most clearly. Registered unemployment there rose 58.8% between October and November 2025, the largest rise in any region and the only regional rise on the year, and fell 13.0% between May and June 2026, the largest regional fall. Nationally, IEFP's July 2026 bulletin counted 23,542 registered unemployed whose last job was in accommodation and restaurants, 10.0% of the 236,570 seeking a new job, against 1,130 job offers received that month, 11.0% of 10,311. Randstad Research measured a fall of 2,469 (9.8%) in the sector's registered unemployed in June 2026, the largest sector fall. In February 2025 hospitality was about half of regional registered unemployment in the Algarve, 17% in Madeira and 15.2% in the Azores.

A pool of 23,500 registered jobless former sector workers against 1,130 new offers a month is not what an absolute shortage looks like. It looks like a mismatch of place, season, hours and pay. Employers say candidates refuse work. In June 2022 AHETA said that 60 people were called for housekeeping interviews, 10 came and none accepted, and that applicants wanted 15% to 30% above the pay offered two years earlier. That is one anecdote. Employers also point to benefits and informal work, with no independent data. Registered unemployment counts people on a register, some of whom are unavailable or working off the books. We found no statistic that separates seasonal from year-round vacancies, so the off-season question stays open.

There is one sign of year-round hiring. The share of sector employees on temporary contracts fell from 34.7% in 2019 to 23.6% in 2025, while the economy-wide share fell from 20.9% to 15.2%, according to a 2025 press report of Eurostat data that we could not re-pull in this run. If it holds, the sector is converting seasonal posts to permanent ones faster than the rest of the economy.

The regional table shows how little is known outside the Algarve. The Algarve and Madeira have the highest dependence on trade, transport and accommodation, 38.6% and 29.9% of jobs, and the most labour evidence. Our Algarve statistics article and Madeira article cover the demand side. For the Azores, Centro and Alentejo we found no sector-specific labour series.

The immigration pipeline is narrowing

The legal route that supplied much of the workforce has changed three times in two years. Decreto-Lei 37-A/2024 of 3 June 2024 ended the manifestação de interesse procedure, the route through which many workers entered and then regularised. AIMA's president said that most residence permits issued in 2025 related to people who entered that way. Lei 9/2025 of 13 February 2025, which is sometimes grouped with the tightening, only adapts Lei 23/2007 to the EU Entry/Exit System and changes the validity of residence permits for citizens of Portuguese-speaking countries. The tightening law is Lei 61/2025 of 22 October 2025 (Diário da República, Série I, n.º 204/2025).

Lei 61/2025 limits the job-search visa to highly qualified work, with a list of professions to follow by ministerial order, and allows reapplication only after a year. Family reunification requires two years of valid residence. Citizens of Portuguese-speaking countries can no longer apply while on a tourist visa or visa-free entry. The nationality route also lengthened: Lei Orgânica 1/2026, in force on 19 May 2026, sets the residence requirement at 10 years, or 7 for EU and Portuguese-speaking-country citizens, as covered in our nationality law article. What that does to retention is not yet measured.

The state's replacement route is a protocol for regulated labour migration signed on 1 April 2025 with five business confederations, including the Confederação do Turismo de Portugal, together with AIMA and IEFP. It promises a visa decision within 20 days of the consular appointment in return for a contract, insurance, a training and language plan and a housing plan. According to ECO, eligible employers are associations with at least 30 members and €200 million combined turnover, or firms with at least 150 workers and €20 million turnover, which would exclude most small hotels. By February 2026 the protocol had drawn more than 3,200 visa requests from over 110 companies. There is no tourism-only count.

The permit data need care. Eurostat's count of first residence permits for employment jumped from 60,553 in 2024 to 240,523 in 2025, but Eurostat flags 2025 as a break in series, and AIMA reported 386,463 valid cards issued by 22 October 2025 against 236,030 a year earlier. Our inference is that the jump mostly reflects AIMA clearing the backlog of procedures begun under the old route, not a quadrupling of arrivals. Consular work visas moved the other way: the minister said about 70,000 were issued in 2025 against 14,000 in 2022, but that is an oral statement without a table.

Does the new law worsen the shortage? The risk is plausible and the evidence is not yet there. AIMA's president expected about half as many entries in 2025, and Madeira's new registrations fell by 30%, but the stock of foreign workers is at a record and the protocol is the sector's own mitigation. Exploitation data are thin. The 2025 internal-security report counted 125 victims of labour trafficking nationally, mostly adult foreign men from Brazil, India and Timor, and 27 victims of all kinds of exploitation in the Faro district, but it does not split by sector. We found no labour-inspectorate enforcement data for hospitality.

How peers handle the same problem

Portugal's neighbours report bigger numbers and set bigger quotas. None of the claims is better sourced than Portugal's.

The pattern is the same everywhere. Governments admit seasonal foreign workers by quota, and the shortage number sits beside the quota without a method. Portugal differs in having no published quota to compare with. Its large, low-barrier route ended in 2024, and the replacement protocol is built for big employers. That leaves the smallest hotels, which depend most on seasonal hiring, with the least clear route.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers. Expect thinner service in July and August at smaller venues. AHRESP said in 2024 that restaurants were shortening hours and opening fewer days, and the Algarve data show why the pressure is seasonal: registered unemployment jumps 58.8% in November as seasonal contracts end. Check opening days and hours between November and February. Book dinners in peak season, and expect queues. Our Algarve travel guide and Madeira travel guide give practical timing for each region.

Tourism businesses and investors. The binding constraint is not a headcount. It is pay at a floor that moves every January, housing within commuting distance, and a legal route that favours large employers. Hourly labour cost at 61.7% of the EU level is the sector's advantage, and 41.5% of workers on the minimum wage in 2022 is the exposure, because the €970 and €1,020 steps scheduled for 2027 and 2028 compress the differential between entry and experienced roles. Underwriters should test hotel plans against turnover, which nobody publishes, rather than against the 15,000 claim. Three readings would change the assessment: a Portuguese vacancy rate above the EU's, a 2025 sector share of foreign workers from Segurança Social, and an AIMA permit series free of the 2025 break.

Journalists and analysts. The citable figures are Eurostat's vacancy counts (3,781 in the fourth quarter of 2025, peak 7,135 in the third quarter of 2022), the sector's 341,000 jobs in 2025, the 93,300 foreign employees and 31.1% share in 2023, 41.5% of workers on the minimum wage in 2022, and 129,000 foreign contributors in December 2025 as a stock, not a share. Do not repeat the 15,000, the 40,000, the 85,000, the 8,000 or the 100,000 as measurements, and do not attribute the €769 to €781 foreign pay figure to hospitality. The finding this article adds to the series is that a headline figure can circulate for five years because it comes from a member survey, and that the sector's labour data are two years behind its employers' claims.