Portugal records highest increase in house prices in the EU in Q2
Both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter, no other European Union country saw such a dramatic rise in house prices in the second quarter of this year.
No other European Union country saw such a large increase in house prices in the second quarter of this year, both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter. According to data published on Friday by Eurostat, Portugal (+17.2%), Bulgaria (+15.5%) and Hungary (+15.1%) were the three Member States that saw the biggest increase compared to the same period last year.
Compared to the first three months of the year, Portugal once again occupies the top position in terms of house price growth, with a rise of 4.7%, which led the Government to approve an extended plan for this sector in recent weeks. In chain terms, Luxembourg (+4.5%) and Croatia (+4.4%) followed.
In aggregate terms, the house price index rose by 5.4% in the European Union and 5.1% in the Eurozone in the period between April and June, compared to the same three months of the previous year. Even so, the European statistics office shows that this indicator slowed down compared to what had been the progression in the first quarter of the year (5.7% and 5.3%, respectively).
On the other hand, even before the summer, rents rose by 3.2% year-on-year and 0.7% compared to the first three months of the year.
Eurostat also compares 2010 with the second quarter of 2025, calculating that house prices rose by 60.5% and rents by 28.8% during that period.
While rents rose steadily, residential property prices followed a more varied pattern: they rose sharply between the first quarter of 2015 and the third quarter of 2022, followed by a slight fall and stabilisation, before starting to rise again in 2024. They have been rising for six consecutive quarters.
Over this period of more than 15 years, house prices have increased more than rents in 21 of the 26 countries for which data is available. Portugal is among those countries where residential property prices have more than doubled (+141%).
Hungary (+277%), Estonia (+250%), Lithuania (+202%), Latvia (+162%) and the Czech Republic (+155%) were the countries with the highest increase in house prices, while Italy was the only one where this indicator fell (-1%) in the period analysed by Eurostat.