Their Portugal, Our Portugal: more developed, but harder to start

Their Portugal, Our Portugal: more developed, but harder to start

At some point, every conversation with our parents seems to land on the same line: “When I was your age, I already...”. It is usually followed by a milestone: a stable job, a rented apartment, or even buying a home. And they are not lying. Portugal is far more developed today, but the path to those milestones has not become equally easier.

There is an undeniable reality: Portugal is a much more developed country today than it was when our parents were growing up. One of the clearest signals is infant mortality, which captures everything from healthcare, access to sanitation and living conditions. In 1970, Portugal still recorded around 55 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. Today, we are talking about around 3 per 1,000. Life expectancy tells a similar story. If you were born in the 1970s, you were expected to live to around 67 years old. A baby born in 2024 can expect to reach around 81. In other words, progress did not just make life more comfortable, but also longer.

Education followed the same upward trajectory. In the 1970s, illiteracy was still widespread, with one in four people not being able to read or write. In the most recent Census (2021), that number had decreased to just 3% of the Portuguese population. Enrollment in higher education also surged. In the 1990s, there were 186,780 students enrolled in tertiary education. Today, that number is 456,032.

And yet, for many in my generation, these gains do not translate into the milestones our parents took for granted. Not because Portugal failed to progress, but because progress did not automatically make independence easier or upward mobility faster. In practice, the “adult checklist” is increasingly shaped by a few hard constraints, and housing is one of the clearest ones.

In 2024, young people in Portugal spent a median 15% of their disposable income on housing. When rent takes a larger share of your income, saving becomes harder, moving out happens later, and other milestones get pushed forward almost by default. As a consequence, on average, the Portuguese leave their parents' houses at 28.9 years, above the EU average. When starting out is delayed, so is everything that depends on it: building savings, taking career risks, investing in skills, or even making long-term plans with any sense of stability.

Housing is only a part of the problem. The cost of living is another pressure point. Even if wages are higher today than when our parents were our age, so is the cost of living. In recent years, that gap became harder to ignore. Inflation surged, and even when wages began to adjust, prices often moved first, further worsening my generation’s prospects. The figure below captures this clearly, as it tracks the year-on-year growth of average gross monthly earnings in nominal terms (not adjusted for inflation) versus real terms (inflation-adjusted), showing how wages can rise on paper while purchasing power decreases.

Even if we set prices aside, the labour market still adds friction to the “adult checklist”. For many young Portuguese, early careers remain marked by insecurity, like short contracts, trial periods, and a slower path to stability. At the same time, this is the most educated generation Portugal has ever produced, with higher education completion among young adults continuing to increase. Yet the transition from a degree to a job that actually matches one’s qualifications is not always smooth. The OECD estimates that around 14% of workers in Portugal are over-qualified for their current job, meaning they have more education than the role typically requires, and that mismatch delays the payoff of education in the years when it matters most.

Portugal’s story over the last few decades is, in many ways, a success story: we became healthier, more educated and more developed. But development is not always the same as mobility. For our parents’ generation, milestones arrived earlier and more predictably. For us, they are increasingly delayed by housing costs, the cost of living, and a labour market that often makes the first steps unstable. The challenge now is not to deny progress, but to make it usable, that is, to rebuild a Portugal where effort and education translate into independence without requiring constant postponement.