The National Statistics Institute releases this Thursday, 26th, the budget balance, in national accounts, for 2025, a value that should reveal a surplus above that predicted by the Government.
The Government included in the State Budget the forecast of a surplus of 0.3% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but the Minister of Finance, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, anticipated that the final value will be a “good surprise and good news for the country”, being higher than expected.
Ricardo Amaro, an economist at Oxford Economics, told Lusa that the estimate for the 2025 surplus is 0.5% of GDP, but “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were even slightly higher given the result from the perspective of public accounting”.
This result is due to positive and negative factors, he assumed, with “the good performance of the economy and the job market contributing to the good performance of tax revenue”.
But “there is also a positive effect in terms of expenditure, for example reducing expenditure on subsidies”, and public accounting execution data “suggest that public investment was once again well below what had been planned”.
The value of the surplus in public accounting was also higher than expected.
As highlighted by the Forum for Competitiveness, in an analysis note, in 2025, the budget balance “recorded a surplus of 1,298 million euros in public accounting (from a cash perspective), around 0.4% of GDP, almost three billion euros above what was initially defined”.
Tax and contribution revenue were above what was projected, he noted, while total expenditure was below what was forecast, both current expenditure (with the exception of expenditure on personnel and transfers) and public investment, whose deviation from the target was R$3,181 million (1% of GDP).
BPI Research also highlighted, in an analysis note, that “in public accounting, the Public Administration budget surplus will have been around 0.4% of GDP in 2025, above that recorded in 2024, from the same perspective (0.1%)”, also being above the Government’s estimate, included in the State Budget for 2026 (OE2026).
In the note, signed by economist Vânia Duarte, it is also highlighted that this is not yet the final reading of the 2025 public accounts but, if one uses “the difference between national accounting and public accounting estimated in OE2026”, it is concluded that “the budget balance from an official perspective would have been around 1.0% of GDP, that is, 0.7 pp above the Government’s estimate”.
For 2025, the Bank of Portugal and the European Commission project a zero balance, while the OECD and the Public Finance Council point to a surplus of 0.1% and the International Monetary Fund estimates a positive balance of 0.2% of GDP.
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