Tech Jobs in Portugal 2026: Openings, Pay and Visas, by the Numbers

TL;DR

Tech jobs in Portugal are easier to find in 2026 than in most of Europe. Eurostat puts the vacancy rate in Portugal’s ICT sector at 4.8% in Q1 2026, against 2.6% for the EU, and only the Netherlands posts a higher rate among the large markets in my table. The pay is lower: in Eurostat’s latest earnings survey, professionals in the sector earned a mean of €39,232 a year, about two thirds of the EU figure. A scan of every live Landing.jobs posting this morning found 55 roles in Portugal, a €50,000 median salary band among the 17 that publish one, and only 5 that require Portuguese. The demand comes mostly from European employers hiring for Lisbon and Porto offices. Remote-first US startups, the employers behind the 2021-2022 nomad wave, have mostly stopped posting.

Web Summit is running in Lisbon this week (November 9-12), which means a fresh round of “Portugal is Europe’s next tech hub” headlines. Most of the guides that rank for this topic come from relocation agencies and give the same three points: sunshine, a digital nomad visa and a tax break that no longer exists in its old form. I wanted numbers instead, so I pulled the official vacancy and earnings series, scanned a Portuguese job board and counted five years of Hacker News hiring threads. All three point the same way: plenty of openings, mostly in offices, at salaries well below the EU average.

Is the tech job market in Portugal growing?

Yes, and it stands out against the rest of Europe. When I wrote about where software engineer jobs in Europe went last month, Portugal and Cyprus were the only markets in my sample where open posts in the information and communication sector grew between 2022 and 2025. Germany’s open posts halved over the same period. Eurostat has since published Q1 2026 under its new activity classification, NACE Rev. 2.1. The change moves computer programming, consultancy, telecoms and hosting out of section J and into a new section K, so the older series can’t be extended directly. Here is the current one:

import json
import urllib.request

API = "https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/api/dissemination/statistics/1.0/data/"
GEOS = ["EU27_2020", "PT", "NL", "DE", "SE", "FR", "IE", "CY", "PL", "ES"]


def series(dataset, **filters):
    """{(geo, period): value} for a Eurostat slice where geo and time are the only open dimensions."""
    query = "&".join(f"{k}={v}" for k, v in filters.items())
    query += "".join(f"&geo={g}" for g in GEOS)
    req = urllib.request.Request(f"{API}{dataset}?format=JSON&{query}", headers={"User-Agent": "x"})
    with urllib.request.urlopen(req, timeout=90) as r:
        d = json.load(r)
    geos = {i: g for g, i in d["dimension"]["geo"]["category"]["index"].items()}
    times = {i: t for t, i in d["dimension"]["time"]["category"]["index"].items()}
    return {(geos[int(k) // len(times)], times[int(k) % len(times)]): v for k, v in d["value"].items()}


# NACE Rev. 2.1 section K = telecoms, programming, consultancy, computing infrastructure
ict = series("jvs_q_r21", indic_em="JVR", nace_r2_1="K", s_adj="NSA", sizeclas="TOTAL",
             sinceTimePeriod="2025-Q4")
whole = series("jvs_q_r21", indic_em="JVR", nace_r2_1="A-T", s_adj="NSA", sizeclas="TOTAL",
               sinceTimePeriod="2026-Q1")
heads = series("isoc_sks_itspt", unit="PC_EMP", sinceTimePeriod="2025")

pct = lambda v: f"{v:.1f}%" if v is not None else "n/a"
print(f"{'geo':<10}{'ICT JVR 25Q4':>13}{'ICT JVR 26Q1':>13}{'all-economy 26Q1':>17}{'ICT share of jobs':>18}")
for g in sorted(GEOS, key=lambda g: -(ict.get((g, "2026-Q1")) or 0)):
    print(f"{g:<10}{pct(ict.get((g, '2025-Q4'))):>13}{pct(ict.get((g, '2026-Q1'))):>13}"
          f"{pct(whole.get((g, '2026-Q1'))):>17}{pct(heads.get((g, '2025'))):>18}")

It only uses the standard library. Running it this morning printed:

geo        ICT JVR 25Q4 ICT JVR 26Q1 all-economy 26Q1 ICT share of jobs
NL                 4.8%         5.3%             4.0%              7.2%
PT                 3.9%         4.8%             1.6%              5.4%
SE                 3.5%         3.6%             2.1%              8.9%
DE                 3.2%         3.2%             2.7%              5.5%
IE                 1.9%         2.9%              n/a              6.2%
EU27_2020          2.4%         2.6%              n/a              5.0%
FR                 2.8%         2.6%              n/a              4.9%
CY                 2.6%         2.4%              n/a              4.9%
PL                 1.5%         1.5%             0.8%              4.5%
ES                 1.0%         1.3%              n/a              4.8%

The job vacancy rate (JVR) is open posts divided by open posts plus occupied ones, so 4.8% means roughly one tech seat in twenty is waiting for someone. The third column is the comparison I find most telling. Across the whole Portuguese economy the rate is 1.6%, so tech employers are three times as short of people as everyone else. In the Netherlands the gap between tech and the rest is just over one point. Spain, the obvious alternative for anyone who wants Iberia, sits at 1.3%. Rerunning the query for every country Eurostat covers puts Belgium (6.8%) as the only one outside my table above Portugal for Q1 2026. Q2 numbers are already out for most countries but not yet for Portugal.

The headcount side moved too. Portugal employed 174,600 ICT specialists in 2019 and 283,900 in 2025, a 63% rise, and their share of all jobs went from 3.6% (below the EU average) to 5.4% (above it). In absolute terms that’s 109,000 extra people in six years. Before the reclassification, the old section-J series showed Portuguese vacancies climbing from 2,815 in Q4 2019 to a peak of 5,899 in Q2 2025. The new section K alone counted 6,196 in Q1 2026.

Two caveats. The vacancy survey counts posts that firms are actively trying to fill, so a company advertising one role on five boards counts once, unlike a job-board tally. But it covers the whole sector, including telecom engineers and IT consultants, so it isn’t a developer-only figure. And a high vacancy rate can mean either “lots of demand” or “the pay is too low to fill the seats”. In Portugal the second explanation is part of the story, as the salary section shows.

Who is hiring: US remote startups left, European offices arrived

The official numbers say demand grew. Hacker News shows a different trend, which says a lot about who is doing the hiring. I pulled every monthly “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” thread since January 2021 through the public HN Algolia API (the items/<thread id> endpoint returns the whole thread) and counted top-level job posts that name Portugal, Lisbon, Porto, Braga or Coimbra:

Portugal’s share of HN job posts peaked in 2023 and has since fallen by more than four fifths, while Eurostat shows vacancies rising. The header line of each post (company, role, location, work model) shows what changed. In 2022, 59 of the 77 posts that named a Portuguese place had “remote” in the header. In 2026 it’s 2 of 9, and 7 say onsite or hybrid.

Six of this year’s nine come from four established companies with a Lisbon office: Cloudflare and Datadog list Lisbon next to New York and London, Riskified hires for Lisbon on a two-days-a-week hybrid schedule, and Joom wants people onsite and offers visa support and relocation. The other three are a small Lisbon company hiring onsite, a Clojure shop with a hybrid option in Lisbon or Oslo, and a US security startup that mentions Portugal only as a past team-offsite venue.

My reading is that the remote hiring that put Lisbon on the map shrank along with US startup funding in 2022-2023, and the office-based hiring that remains is a much smaller share of an HN board that is itself about a third of its 2021 size.

The new hiring comes from European companies opening offices. In October, ECO reported that DKV Mobility is building a data and AI hub in Porto with about 50 people by the end of 2026 and 150 by the end of 2027. Two weeks later Continental announced a technology competence centre for about 500 people at its Lousado tyre complex near Famalicão. Both are established industrial groups, and both want people at a desk in northern Portugal, a few days a week at least.

Where the jobs are: Lisbon first, then Porto and Braga

To see what employers are posting right now, I scanned every live listing on Landing.jobs, a Lisbon-based tech job board whose public JSON API includes salary bands, locations, tags and full descriptions:

import json
import re
import statistics
import time
import urllib.request
from collections import Counter

API = "https://landing.jobs/api/v1/jobs?limit=50&offset={}"


def fetch_all():
    jobs, offset = [], 0
    while page := json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(urllib.request.Request(
            API.format(offset), headers={"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}), timeout=60)):
        jobs += page
        offset += len(page)
        time.sleep(1)
    return jobs


def body(job):
    raw = " ".join(job.get(k) or "" for k in ("main_requirements", "nice_to_have", "role_description", "perks"))
    return re.sub(r"<[^>]+>", " ", raw).lower()


def level(title):
    t = title.lower()
    if re.search(r"\b(lead|principal|staff|head|architect)\b", t):
        return "lead/staff"
    return "senior" if re.search(r"\bsenior\b|\bsr\b", t) else "other"


pt = [j for j in fetch_all() if any(l.get("country_code") == "PT" for l in j.get("locations") or [])]
print(f"postings with a Portugal location: {len(pt)}")
print("cities:", Counter(l.get("city") for j in pt for l in j["locations"]
                         if l.get("country_code") == "PT").most_common(4))

paid = [j for j in pt if j.get("gross_salary_low")]
mid = lambda j: (j["gross_salary_low"] + (j.get("gross_salary_high") or j["gross_salary_low"])) / 2
print(f"salary band published: {len(paid)} of {len(pt)}")
for lvl in ("other", "senior", "lead/staff"):
    v = [mid(j) for j in paid if level(j["title"]) == lvl]
    if v:
        print(f"  {lvl:<10} n={len(v):<3} median midpoint EUR {statistics.median(v):,.0f}")
print(f"  {'all':<10} n={len(paid):<3} median midpoint EUR {statistics.median(map(mid, paid)):,.0f}")
for city in ("Lisbon", "Porto"):
    v = [mid(j) for j in paid if any(l.get("city") == city for l in j["locations"])]
    print(f"  {city:<10} n={len(v):<3} median midpoint EUR {statistics.median(v):,.0f}")
braga = [j for j in pt if any(l.get("city") == "Braga" for l in j["locations"])]
print(f"Braga postings: {len(braga)}, also listing Lisbon or Porto: "
      f"{sum(any(l.get('city') in ('Lisbon', 'Porto') for l in j['locations']) for j in braga)}")

share = lambda words: sum(any(w in body(j) for w in words) for j in pt) / len(pt)
print(f"mentions English: {share(['english']):.0%}   hybrid: {share(['hybrid']):.0%}   "
      f"remote flag: {sum(bool(j.get('remote')) for j in pt) / len(pt):.0%}   "
      f"relocation paid: {sum(bool(j.get('relocation_paid')) for j in pt) / len(pt):.0%}")
print("top tags:", ", ".join(f"{t} {n}" for t, n in
                             Counter(t for j in pt for t in j.get("tags") or []).most_common(8)))
print("tagged Artificial Intelligence:", sum("Artificial Intelligence" in (j.get("tags") or []) for j in pt))

# every mention of the Portuguese language, printed for a manual read
for j in pt:
    for m in re.finditer(r".{0,50}portuguese.{0,40}", body(j)):
        print(f"  [{j['id']}] {m.group(0).strip()}")

Output from the run on November 11, 2026:

postings with a Portugal location: 55
cities: [('Lisbon', 51), ('Porto', 9), ('Braga', 9), ('Coimbra', 3)]
salary band published: 17 of 55
  other      n=12  median midpoint EUR 42,950
  senior     n=4   median midpoint EUR 58,000
  lead/staff n=1   median midpoint EUR 35,000
  all        n=17  median midpoint EUR 50,000
  Lisbon     n=16  median midpoint EUR 51,250
  Porto      n=1   median midpoint EUR 30,000
Braga postings: 9, also listing Lisbon or Porto: 9
mentions English: 69%   hybrid: 40%   remote flag: 2%   relocation paid: 0%
top tags: Python 15, Amazon Web Services 11, CI/CD 9, Java 8, Kubernetes 8, Docker 8, SQL 7, DevOps 7
tagged Artificial Intelligence: 6
  [19513] ide monitor + ergonomic setup  25 days vacation + portuguese holidays  private health insurance  €2,
  [19566] strong written and verbal communication skills in portuguese and english, with the ability to work e
  [19618] g problems  strong written and spoken english and portuguese     keen interest in modern ai/ml techn
  [19619] g problems  strong written and spoken english and portuguese     keen interest in modern ai/ml techn
  [19620] tradeoffs  strong written and spoken english and portuguese.     experience with ai-assisted coding
  [19641] .  fluency in english is required; proficiency in portuguese is a plus.      lead the design, config
  [19642] akeholder management skills.  fluency in english; portuguese is a plus.      lead the design, config
  [19721] rtugal (candidates must be based in portugal with portuguese or eu citizenship, or a valid work perm
  [19806] ss drive for feedback to improve.  fluent in both portuguese and english.  knowledge in sales and lo

Fifty-five postings is a small sample. Landing.jobs is one board among several, and the bigger Portuguese sites (ITJobs, Net-Empregos, LinkedIn) don’t offer an open API. Treat the shares as a snapshot of one mid-sized tech board. The city split is lopsided. Lisbon appears on 51 of 55 postings, often next to a second city. Porto and Braga tie at 9, but every Braga listing also names Lisbon or Porto. Eight are multi-city consultancy roles (SAP, Salesforce, Dynamics 365), and one is a Java developer job split between Braga and Porto. Coimbra shows up 3 times.

The work model is mostly hybrid. Only one posting sets the API’s remote flag, 40% use the word “hybrid” in the description, and none offers paid relocation. If you plan to live in Portugal and work for a Portuguese office, that’s fine. If you hoped to land a Portuguese salary while living somewhere cheaper, this board has almost nothing for you.

The tag counts look like any European enterprise stack in 2026: Python (15), AWS (11), CI/CD (9), then Java, Kubernetes and Docker at 8 each. Six postings carry an “Artificial Intelligence” tag. Going through the 15 Python postings by title, 11 are data or AI roles (Snowflake pipelines, LLM and RAG work, data science), the same profile DKV says it is hiring for in Porto. The other four are backend, DevOps and infrastructure jobs.

What tech jobs in Portugal pay

Portugal pays less than almost every market it competes with for engineers. Eurostat’s Structure of Earnings Survey, run every four years and last published for 2022, breaks out mean gross annual earnings for professionals (ISCO group 2) working in the information and communication sector, in firms with ten or more employees:

In euros, Portugal is the lowest-paid country in the table after Poland, and after adjusting for price levels it ranks last, a little below Poland. The premium over the local economy is large, though: the mean for all employees in Portugal was €23,112, so a professional in the tech sector earned about 1.7 times the national average. For a local graduate, tech is among the better-paid careers in the country. For an engineer comparing a German offer with a Lisbon one, the national means imply a 50% pay cut in nominal terms.

These figures are from 2022, and Portuguese wages have risen since (the minimum wage alone went from €705 to €920). The Landing.jobs bands give a more current, if thinner, read: a median midpoint of €50,000 across the 17 postings with a band, €51,250 for the 16 in Lisbon, €58,000 for the four with “Senior” in the title, and €42,950 for everything else. Only one Porto posting published a band (€30,000), so I can’t say anything useful about the Lisbon-Porto gap from this sample. Two thirds of the postings publish no number at all. That should change for EU employers once the pay transparency directive is in national law, although it requires disclosing a range to applicants, not in every ad.

Portuguese contracts quote an annual gross figure split into 14 payments: twelve monthly salaries plus holiday pay (usually around June) and Christmas pay (by mid-December). A €50,000 offer is therefore about €3,570 gross per payslip, and recruiters often quote the monthly figure. Ask which one you’re looking at before comparing it with a German or Dutch offer, where the monthly figure usually covers twelve payments.

For a wider view across the continent, my Europe software engineer salary breakdown ranks the big cities after tax and rent. Portugal only appears there in the small-hub section, but the same method applies, and the IFICI regime below makes Lisbon look better after tax than on gross pay.

Do you need to speak Portuguese?

For most tech jobs, no. The script prints every place where a posting mentions the Portuguese language, and reading them one by one gives this split:

• 5 of 55 postings require Portuguese (an SAP consultant, a solutions architect, and three data/AI roles at a single consultancy)
• 2 list it as a plus
• 2 mention it for other reasons (Portuguese public holidays, Portuguese citizenship as one eligibility option)

About 9% of postings demand the language, and three of those five come from one employer. English appears in 69% of descriptions. That’s a friendlier picture than Germany, where non-German speakers compete for a shrinking English-language slice of a market that has half the open posts it had in 2022. Client-facing consultancy and SAP roles are where Portuguese shows up, because the clients are Portuguese or Brazilian companies. Day-to-day life is another matter: rental contracts, the tax office and AIMA appointments all run in Portuguese, and a basic level saves real time.

Visas and permits for non-EU developers

EU and EEA citizens need no visa. After three months you register with the local câmara municipal and get a registration certificate. Everyone else has fewer options than in 2024, because Law 61/2025, published on October 22, 2025, rewrote large parts of the foreigners’ act.

The main routes for a developer from outside the EU:

The D8 is often sold as the easy route, but it’s built for people whose employer or clients are outside Portugal. If a Lisbon office hires you, you need a work-based permit. The old job-seeker visa, which let anyone come for 120 days to look for work, is gone. Law 61/2025 replaces it with a job-seeker visa for highly qualified workers in occupations the government lists by ordinance, and Fragomen’s summary and several law firms report that the new visa still needed implementing regulations before applications could open. Check its status with a consulate before you plan around it. The same law ended the “manifestação de interesse” route, under which people could regularise after arriving and starting work.

Processing time is the other constraint. The immigration agency AIMA spent 2025 clearing a backlog. In May 2026 the government told parliament the recovery effort had held 763,000 appointments and decided over 525,000 files. It’s better than it was, but plan for months, and ask an employer with a Tech Visa certification how long their last hires waited. A certified employer is usually the fastest route in.

Taxes: IFICI replaced the old NHR

The non-habitual resident regime that made Portugal famous among remote workers is closed to new applicants. Its replacement is IFICI, the tax incentive for scientific research and innovation, nicknamed “NHR 2.0”. According to the tax authority’s FAQ:

• qualifying employment or self-employment income is taxed at a flat 20% for ten consecutive years, and most foreign-source income is exempt
• you qualify only if you weren’t a Portuguese tax resident in the previous five years and never had NHR or IFICI before
• the job must qualify. The list covers research and teaching roles, jobs at startups certified by Startup Portugal, and qualified positions at companies recognised by bodies such as AICEP or IAPMEI. A generic job at a local IT outsourcer may not qualify.
• you apply on the Portal das Finanças by 15 January of the year after you become resident. Someone who moved in 2026 has until 15 January 2027.

Without IFICI, Portugal’s progressive IRS rates bite early. A €50,000 salary sits in the upper middle brackets, and the top rate is 48%. The government cut rates again in September 2026 for income earned in 2026, mostly in the lower and middle brackets. Workers up to 35 can also use IRS Jovem, which exempts a share of employment income that shrinks over ten years; the annual cap is reported at about €29,500 for 2026 (55 times the IAS social index). For a mid-career engineer on €50,000 who qualifies, the flat 20% sits well below the marginal rate that salary pays under the normal scale, which is why after-tax comparisons treat Lisbon more kindly than gross-pay tables do.

Why the seats stay empty

Eurostat’s ICT usage survey asks firms that recruited ICT specialists whether the vacancies were hard to fill and why. In Portugal’s 2024 round, 50.5% of firms that hired or tried to hire tech staff reported hard-to-fill vacancies, below the EU’s 57.5% and down from 61.4% in 2022. The most common reason, cited by 41% of the recruiting firms, was that applicants’ salary expectations were too high. It was the top reason in 2022 as well, at 56%. What changed is the supply of candidates: “lack of applications” fell from 50% of recruiting firms in 2022 to 34% in 2024.

I read that as a market where candidates are showing up, but at prices local employers don’t want to pay. That fits the HN data: the people who moved to Lisbon on US remote salaries in 2021-2022 set expectations that a Portuguese payroll can’t match. It also explains why foreign companies keep opening offices. Hiring a senior data engineer in Porto for €55,000-60,000 is cheap for a German firm and still well above the local average.

Portugal or Cyprus?

This site is written from Cyprus, so the other small southern hub is the obvious benchmark. On the numbers, Portugal has more openings and Cyprus pays more. Cyprus’s ICT vacancy rate fell from 2.6% to 2.4% between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 (and to 2.0% in Q2, which Eurostat has already published for Cyprus), while Portugal’s climbed to 4.8%. Portugal’s market is also more than eleven times larger: 283,900 ICT specialists in 2025 against about 24,700. But professionals in the Cypriot sector earned a mean of €53,572 in 2022, 37% more than in Portugal, and Cyprus’s 2026 tax reform exempts half of the salary from income tax for new residents earning over €55,000. I broke that down in the Cyprus software engineer salary guide. If you’re early in your career and need volume, Portugal has more doors. If you have a senior offer in hand, the Limassol number will probably be bigger.

FAQ

Is it easy to get a tech job in Portugal as a foreigner?

Easier than in most of the EU right now. Portugal’s ICT vacancy rate of 4.8% in Q1 2026 is nearly double the EU’s 2.6%, and fewer than one in ten postings in my scan required Portuguese. The hard part for non-EU candidates is the permit, so target employers certified for the Tech Visa and expect a wait at AIMA.

What is the average software engineer salary in Portugal?

Eurostat’s 2022 survey puts professionals in the ICT sector at a mean of €39,232 gross a year. Current postings on Landing.jobs had a median band midpoint of €50,000, with senior roles around €58,000. Salaries are usually quoted as an annual gross paid in 14 instalments.

Can I work in tech in Portugal without speaking Portuguese?

Yes, for most developer roles. In the Landing.jobs scan, 5 of 55 postings required Portuguese, mostly client-facing consultancy and SAP work. English appeared in 69% of descriptions.

Which city in Portugal is best for tech jobs?

Lisbon, by a wide margin: it appeared on 51 of 55 postings. Porto and Braga each had 9, and northern Portugal is where new engineering centres like DKV Mobility’s Porto hub and Continental’s Famalicão site are going.

Can I use the digital nomad visa to work for a Portuguese company?

No. The D8 visa is designed for people earning from employers or clients outside Portugal, with an income requirement of about €3,680 a month in 2026. A job with a Portuguese employer needs a work-based permit such as the Tech Visa, the EU Blue Card or the highly qualified activity permit.

Sources

• Eurostat jvs_q_r21: job vacancy statistics by NACE Rev. 2.1, quarterly
• Eurostat isoc_sks_itspt: ICT specialists in employment
• Eurostat earn_ses22_49: Structure of Earnings Survey 2022, mean annual earnings by occupation and activity
• Eurostat isoc_ske_itrcrn2: enterprises that recruited ICT specialists and had hard-to-fill vacancies
• Landing.jobs: job board whose public API supplied the posting scan
• HN Algolia API: “Who is hiring?” thread data, 2021-2026
• Portal das Finanças IFICI FAQ: rules and deadlines of the 20% regime
• Law 61/2025 in the Diário da República: the 2025 amendment to the foreigners’ act
• Fragomen: Portugal immigration reforms in effect: summary of the job-seeker visa and regularisation changes
• Portuguese government on the AIMA recovery operation (May 14, 2026)
• Portuguese government on the September 2026 IRS cut
• Literacia Financeira: minimum wage 2026: €920 under Decreto-Lei 139/2025
• ECO News: DKV Mobility Porto tech hub and ECO: Continental technology centre in Famalicão

Bottom line

Portugal hires a lot and pays modestly, and the same thing explains both. Foreign companies open offices in Lisbon, Porto and Braga because professionals there earned about half of the German mean and 43% less than the Dutch one in Eurostat’s 2022 survey, and that steady stream of new offices keeps the vacancy rate near 5%. For an EU citizen early or mid-career, I’d take that trade, especially with IFICI cutting the tax bill to 20% for a decade. For a senior engineer with a strong offer elsewhere, Portugal makes sense for the lifestyle, and the salary will be lower than in Amsterdam or Munich. I’ll rerun both scripts when Eurostat publishes Portugal’s Q2 figure. A rate still above 4% would mean this is more than a one-quarter spike.