Portugal Tourism Receipts: €29.1B, a €22B Travel Surplus and the Balance-of-Payments View

What the €29.1bn counts, and what it leaves out

The headline figure is the travel credit in Portugal's balance of payments: €29,119M in 2025 on the current vintage, up 5.0% on 2024 and 58.8% on 2019. Banco de Portugal first published it on 19 February 2026 as €29.13bn and has revised it by €12M since. Revisions to this line are small. Revisions to GDP move its weight more: Banco de Portugal has described 2024 receipts as both 9.6% and 9.7% of GDP, while Eurostat's current GDP gives 9.53%.

Under the international manual (BPM6), travel means goods and services bought for own use by non-residents during stays of less than a year. Business travellers count, and so do foreign students and medical patients even when they stay longer, along with seasonal and cross-border workers. A Spanish family filling up with fuel in Elvas is in it. So is an Erasmus student's rent in Coimbra and a Brazilian visitor's dinner in Lisbon.

International passenger transport is not. A ticket a New Yorker buys from TAP is recorded under transport, which earned Portugal €4.9bn from passengers in 2024, €4.86bn of it by air (Eurostat, older vintage). That is why the airline's future, covered in our TAP privatisation explainer, matters to the export accounts separately from the visitors it carries. Package holidays are split: the Portuguese hotel and ground services inside a German operator's package count as Portuguese travel exports, while the operator's margin and the foreign airline's fare do not.

Banco de Portugal does not split the figure by region. There is no official receipts total for Lisbon, the Algarve or Madeira, a gap this series has recorded in every regional article. The nearest proxies are card data. Shop purchases and cash withdrawals on cards issued abroad came to €12,409.7M in 2025 (Banco de Portugal payment statistics), 42.6% of travel receipts. SIBS, which runs the domestic network, reported €8.4bn of foreign-card spending and split it by region: Grande Lisboa about 33.5%, the Algarve 21.9%, Norte 21.0%, Centro 6.3%, Madeira 5.9% and the Azores 3.8%.

The Tourism Satellite Account starts from the same balance-of-payments lines and adds international fares bought from Portuguese carriers. In 2023, the last year INE split it, inbound tourism consumption was €28,686M against travel credits of €25,470M. Air transport bought by visitors explains €4,163M of the gap; the remaining difference of about €947M runs the other way and INE does not decompose it (derived, mixed vintages). The CST's larger total of €49.4bn includes residents' domestic trips and is a measure of demand. Neither CST figure should be quoted as tourism receipts.

The practical rule is to name the measure every time. Receipts are what foreigners spend; the balance is receipts net of what residents spend abroad; satellite-account consumption adds fares and, in its larger version, residents; accommodation revenue is one industry's turnover from all guests; card totals are a payment channel. A sentence that says 'tourism revenue' without saying which of these it means cannot be checked.

Thirty years in one series

Eurostat's version of Banco de Portugal's travel account begins in 1996, when receipts were €3,687M. They passed €10bn in 2014, reached €18,332M in 2019, fell 57.6% to €7,766M in 2020 and were back above 2019 by 15.8% in 2022. From 2000 to 2025 they grew 6.7% a year on average in nominal terms. Before the pandemic only two setbacks interrupted the climb: 2002–03, when receipts slipped 4.5% over two years, and 2009, when they fell 7.2%.

Two things stand out. Receipts have set a nominal record every year since 2022, and the rate of growth has roughly halved every year: 20.0% in 2023, 8.9% in 2024, 5.0% in 2025. Our 2025 annual report showed why: deflated by Portugal's restaurant and hotel prices, receipts since 2019 rose in line with foreign nights, so most of the money gained since 2019 is price.

The second is the gap between receipts and spending abroad. In 1996 Portugal earned €2.09 from foreign visitors for every euro its residents spent travelling. By 2025 it earned €4.07. Debits rose 39.7% from 2019 to 2025 against 58.8% for credits, so the outbound habit has not caught up with the inbound boom. In 2026 that is starting to change.

The balance-of-payments view

Travel credits were 21.7% of Portugal's exports of goods and services in 2025, up from 19.5% in 2019, and 47.9% of services exports, down from 50.6%. Both statements are true at once because goods exports barely grew while other services, from transport to business and IT services, grew faster than tourism. The services surplus outside travel more than doubled, from €5.1bn in 2019 to €11.2bn in 2025 (derived), so tourism now carries a smaller share of the services account than before the pandemic even as its own surplus grew by two-thirds. Receipts equalled 9.44% of GDP, and the travel balance 7.12%.

The balance of €21,965M was the highest in Banco de Portugal's series, which begins in 1948. That record holds in euros only. Measured against the economy the 2025 surplus was slightly smaller than 2024's 7.18% of GDP. Lusa and ECO reported 7.2% in February using an earlier GDP estimate; on the October 2026 GDP vintage the figure is 7.12%.

The surplus matters most against the goods account. Portugal's goods deficit was €16.3bn in 2019, €24.9bn in 2024 and €30.2bn in 2025. Travel rose €1.07bn in 2025 while the goods balance worsened by €5.3bn, and the current-account surplus halved from €7.3bn to €3.6bn. Without visitors Portugal would be a deficit country. With them, it runs a small surplus whose size now depends on whether tourism grows faster than the goods gap widens.

The claims above share a pattern. Most are true in one unit and false in another: euros against share of GDP, services exports against all exports, a modelled contribution against a recorded receipt. The safest sentence about Portuguese tourism money is short: €29.1bn of receipts, €22.0bn of surplus, a fifth of exports, a little under a tenth of GDP.

Who pays: receipts by market

The United Kingdom has been Portugal's largest source of travel receipts every year since at least 2010, with €4,276M in 2025, 14.7% of the total. Germany moved to second in 2025 with €3,362M, passing France (€3,197M, down 1.2%) for the first time in the period our researchers checked. ECO's report on the February release described the ranking as unchanged; it was not. The United States was fourth with €3,137M, up 8%, and Spain fifth with €2,940M on the February vintage, revised down to €2,836M in later data.

Concentration has fallen sharply. The top three markets supplied 50.3% of receipts in 2010, 42.7% in 2019 and 37.2% in 2025, the same direction our diversification index found for nights. Ireland (€1,226M) has been ahead of Brazil (€1,199M) since 2024, Canada's receipts are 2.3 times their 2019 level and Poland's 2.6 times.

The first half of 2026 shows where growth is coming from. The UK earned Portugal €1,948.5M (+4.4%), Germany €1,542.1M (+4.6%) and the US €1,523.0M (+8%), with Spain at €1,130.1M (+7.1%) and France at €1,123.3M (−5.7%). Brazil rose 18.1% to €657.1M. The US and Brazil together supplied 41.1% of the half-year's growth. Banco de Portugal has not yet released a country split for January to August.

Where Portuguese residents spend: the partner balances

The debit side of the account gets little attention, and it changes the picture of individual markets. Portuguese residents spent €7,157M on travel abroad in 2025 (February vintage). Spain took €1,623M of it, 22.7%, ahead of France (€672M), Italy (€406M), Cape Verde (€274M) and the United States (€270M). Spending in Japan almost doubled, up 95.9% to €88M.

Since 2019 Portuguese spending in Spain has risen 40.9%, from €1,152M, roughly the pace of total debits. Spending in Italy rose 72.8%, from €235M, and in Japan almost fourfold from €23M. Spending in the UK fell from €693M to €311M over the same period (Eurostat), which is why the British surplus widened even though UK receipts grew more slowly than the total.

Our research brief assumed Spain would be the partner with which Portugal's travel surplus was smallest. It was wrong. Portugal earned €1,317M more from Spaniards than its residents spent in Spain. The smallest surplus among the large partners was with Italy, €319M, because Portuguese residents spend more than half as much there as Italians spend in Portugal. Both Spain and Italy cover their debits only 1.8 times. The UK covers them 13.8 times, Germany 12.1 and the US 11.6.

A few partners run the other way. Japan was in deficit in 2025 (−€36M), and in 2024, the last year with published figures, so were Morocco (−€77M) and Türkiye (−€10M). Cape Verde is probably in deficit too, but no credit figure is published for it. The overall surplus was €21,974M on this vintage, and three markets, the UK, Germany and the US, supplied €9,917M of it (derived).

Spain is the clearest case of a market that looks different in money than in people. Our US-versus-Spain analysis found nine ways to rank the two; in the balance of payments the answer is unambiguous. Americans spent €3,137M and Portuguese spent €270M in the US, a surplus of €2,867M. Spaniards spent €2,940M and Portuguese spent €1,623M in Spain, a surplus of €1,317M.

Per night or per visit: two ways to rank spending

Dividing receipts by registered foreign nights gives €485 per night for 2025, up from €355 in 2019. The figure is useful as a trend and misleading as a level, because the numerator includes spending by visitors who never appear in accommodation statistics: day-trippers, people staying with family, owners of second homes and students.

Per night, France ranks first at €668, ahead of the US (€572), Ireland (€524) and Spain (€520). Per arrival, using INE's count of non-resident tourists, the US leads at €1,648, followed by Ireland (€1,402), Germany (€1,328) and the UK (€1,203). Spain falls to €413 and Brazil to €794. The two rankings disagree because of how many nights each market spends in registered accommodation per trip: 0.79 for Spain, 1.47 for France and 1.62 for Brazil, against roughly 2.8 to 2.9 for the UK, the US and Germany (derived). Across all markets, receipts per non-resident tourist rose from €745 in 2019 to €973 in 2025, up 30.6% while Portuguese consumer prices rose 20.4% (derived from Banco de Portugal, INE and Eurostat), so the average visit is worth about 8% more in real terms.

A Spaniard on a day trip to Porto or a French family visiting relatives in Minho spends money that Banco de Portugal records and INE's hotel survey does not see. That inflates per-night values for diaspora and cross-border markets. Per-arrival values are the fairer comparison of what a visit is worth; per-night values say more about how much spending happens outside hotels. The UK market article showed the British pattern in detail: long stays, mostly in registered accommodation, with spending per night up about 1% in real terms since 2019.

The money is less seasonal than it was

Receipts are still summer-heavy, but less so. Eurostat's quarterly data put the third quarter at 39.8% of 2019 receipts and 38.4% in both 2024 and 2025. The ratio of third-quarter to first-quarter receipts fell from 2.53 to 2.23. Banco de Portugal's own analysis, published in January 2026, found that June to September fell from 49% of annual receipts in 2014 to 47% in 2024, and August from about 18% to 15%.

The monthly pattern in 2026 so far runs from €1,501M in February, the quietest month, to €4,436.2M in August, higher than any month in 2024 or 2025. August earned 2.96 times as much as February (derived). The French and Spanish markets are the most summer-dependent: about 76% of French receipts and 72% of Spanish receipts in 2025 had arrived by the end of August, against 67% to 70% for Germany, the US and the UK. That fits a diaspora that returns in July and August.

Southern Europe: Portugal's surplus in context

On the net travel balance as a share of GDP, Portugal ranks fourth in the EU, behind Croatia (13.5%), Malta (8.8%) and Greece (8.1%). In 2019 it was fifth; it has since overtaken Cyprus. Spain earns 3.6 times as much as Portugal from visitors, but its economy is more than five times larger, so tourism weighs less there: 6.2% of GDP against 9.4%. Portugal's share of the sum of EU member states' travel receipts rose from 4.78% in 2019 to 5.84% in 2025 (derived; the sum includes intra-EU flows). On receipts as a share of exports it ranks third, behind Croatia and Greece. Portugal's 58.8% growth in receipts since 2019 was the second-fastest in the EU, behind Malta's 71.7%; in euros it ranks fourth, after Spain, France and Italy. All of these are nominal.

Portugal also earns more per registered foreign night than its neighbours: €485 against €320 in Spain and €180 in Greece, though France is higher at €514 (derived from Eurostat). Part of that is real pricing power. Part is the short average stay in Portugal's accommodation statistics and the large volume of spending by visitors outside it. The outbound side is where Portugal differs most from France and Italy, whose residents spend 60% to 74% as much abroad as visitors spend at home. Among the eight, only Croatia and Cyprus saw spending abroad grow faster than receipts between 2019 and 2025.

2026: receipts slow, spending abroad speeds up

Banco de Portugal's data to August 2026 show receipts of €20,961.6M, up 3.2% on the same months of 2025. The first quarter grew 3.9%, the second 4.4%, July 1.4% and August 1.9%. The Secretary of State for Tourism, Pedro Machado, had said in February that receipts could grow 5% to 6% this year. On the first eight months, the year is running below that range.

Spending abroad is growing faster. Portuguese residents' travel debits reached €5,040.2M from January to August, up 5.7%, and the travel balance grew only 2.5% to €15,921.4M (derived from Banco de Portugal figures via Presstur). Leaving aside the 2020 collapse, spending abroad has not grown faster than receipts since 2019. The shift matches what our domestic tourism analysis found in the accommodation data: residents' trips abroad have grown more than three times as fast as domestic trips since 2016.

If receipts kept growing at 3.2% for the rest of the year they would reach about €30.05bn, the first full year above €30bn (an illustration, not a forecast). The autumn months will decide it. Foreign nights in registered accommodation were almost flat to August, US demand dipped in July after long-haul fares rose, and Lisbon's airport has no spare capacity for growth in volume. More of the gain will have to come from price, and price growth in accommodation has slowed.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers. Portugal's receipts are less seasonal than they were, but February still earns less than half what August does, and the shoulder months are where visitors get most for their money. The rise in spending per foreign night from €355 to €485 since 2019 is mostly price, so budget accordingly in Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve in summer. One thing most visitors miss: if you book a package through a foreign operator, only the part spent on the ground reaches the Portuguese economy, so local guides, restaurants and transfers bought directly put more money into the places you visit. Our Portugal itinerary shows how to spread a trip across regions and seasons.

Tourism businesses and investors. The binding fact for 2026 is growth of 3.2% in receipts against 5.7% in residents' spending abroad. Receipts growth has halved each year since 2023 and in 2025 was already below restaurant price inflation of 5.8%, so revenue plans that assume the 2022–24 trajectory are out of date. The market mix is shifting toward the US, Brazil, Ireland, Canada and Poland, which spend more per arrival or are growing fastest, and away from France, whose receipts fell in 2025 and in the first half of 2026. Watch three thresholds: credits growth below debits growth for the full year, which would stall the surplus; the September flash on 30 October, which will show whether 2026 is on course to cross €30bn; and the goods deficit, which now absorbs most of the travel surplus.

Journalists and analysts. Safe to cite: travel receipts of €29,119M in 2025 (+5.0%, +58.8% on 2019); a travel balance of €21,965M, a nominal record since 1948 and 7.12% of GDP; travel at 21.7% of goods and services exports and 47.9% of services exports; the travel surplus covering 72.8% of the goods deficit; Germany #2 by receipts ahead of France; Spain the largest destination for Portuguese spending abroad at €1,623M; and January–August 2026 receipts up 3.2% against debits up 5.7%. Do not repeat: that tourism pays for the trade deficit, that 2025 was a record share of GDP, that tourism is half of services exports today, that Portugal's receipts grew faster than anywhere in the EU, or any WTTC contribution figure as receipts. The series finding this article adds is a methodological one: Portugal publishes no official regional receipts, and the card data that fill the gap capture only 29% to 43% of the national total, depending on whose card network is counted.