Portugal’s wealth distribution has a sharp divide. The top 10% of adults owns 60.0% of net wealth in the latest estimate. The bottom 50% owns 3.6%.
The income divide is smaller
The same WID snapshot estimates that the top 10% receives 35.5% of pretax income, while the bottom half receives 20.4%. The top tenth’s share is about 1.7 times the bottom half’s share for income. For net wealth, the ratio is about 16.5 to 1, calculated from the unrounded estimates.
That contrast is the central finding. A flow of income is distributed more evenly than the assets people have accumulated after debt.
A distribution is not a diagnosis of a household
These are national distribution estimates, expressed per adult. They do not adjust for household size, housing costs, regional prices or whether someone rents or owns a home with a mortgage. Someone’s position in this distribution cannot, on its own, tell us how secure or comfortable their life feels.
The WID combines national accounts, fiscal records and surveys to estimate the full distribution, including the upper tail that household surveys often miss. The series is revised as source data and methods improve. Read the 2024 values as estimates, not exact accounts of every household.
The dashboard lets you compare salary, pretax income and wealth separately. Its salary benchmark is from 2022, while the WID income and wealth estimates extend through 2024.
Explore the Portugal income, salary and wealth dashboard.
Sources and method
- World Inequality Database country data, Portugal, 2024 estimates.
- WID percentile definitions.
- Eurostat Structure of Earnings Survey, 2022 salary benchmark in the dashboard.