Business loans cost more in Portugal

Portuguese companies pay 69% more for loan servicing than other countries in the rest of the European Union.

According to Público and based on ECB statistics from 2016 to 2019, it can be deduced that the difference in the cost of credit financing (i.e., servicing loans, overdrafts and other credit facilities) as well as the difference in the average interest rates charges on such mechanisms, was 110 base points (1.1 percentage points).
The ECB numbers show that collectively Portuguese companies “pay €380 million more per year on average than in the Euro Zone countries, and that the “absence of alternatives to credit and recapitalisation have a negative impact” on Portugal’s companies network.