Portugal’s AD government is basking in the news today that the budgetary surplus for 2025 came in at €2.058 billion – equivalent to 0.7% of GDP.
The reason for such a moment for celebration is that a) the country is unlikely to see anything like it in the immediate future, due to global geopolitical upheaval, and b) it is higher even than the government’s own estimate (which was for a much lower surplus of just 0.3%).
For finance minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, this is the second highest surplus in Portugal’s democratic history (the highest having been on the watch of Socialist finance minister Fernando Medina, in much less fraught times).
The results have been released by INE statistics institute in the context of obligatory twice-yearly notifications that have to be sent to Brussels. The next notification is due in September.
As reports stress, “these numbers can be subject to alteration, as INE incorporates new data into its accounting”.
The current notification also shows that the Ministry of Finance has revised its forecasts for public debt, now anticipating that it will reach 87.5% in 2026. In the 2026 State Budget, the government had forecast a public debt ratio of 87.8% for this year.
INE figures are being released for a number of ‘areas’ – and show that underpinning this budgetary surplus (presented by some media sources as a ‘brilharete’, or ‘great performance’) is the fact that the tax burden carried by citizens increased in 2025 to 35.4%.
