Rate of house rent increases slows for 5th month running

The rate of rent increases for accommodation paid by tenants has again slowed for the fifth month running according to data released by the National Statistics Institute (INE) this week.

Rents actually paid by tenants increased 5.2% in like-for-like terms, below the 5.3% increase seen in April and the 7% registered between April and December last year. In other words rents haven’t fallen but they have gone up at a slower rate.

“The like-for-like variation on housing rents per square metre was 5.2% in May, 2025 (5.3% in April)”, says the INE.

Madeira continued to see more significant increases. “All regions saw positive like-for-like variations in housing rentals, Madeira seeing the highest at 7.5%”, the institute adds.

The statistics office adds that “the average value of housing rents per square meter registered a monthly variation of 0.3% (0.4% in the previous month). The region with the highest positive monthly variation was also Madeira (0.4%), with no region showing a negative variation in the respective average value of housing rents”.

Taking 2004 as a whole, housing rents jumped by 7% – the highest annual increase since 1994 and considerably above the rate of inflation of 2.4%.