The report “Revenue Statistics 2025,” published today by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), estimates that the tax revenue collected by Portugal, measured as a percentage of GDP, decreased by 0.2 percentage points from 2023 to 2024, from 35.3% to 35.1%.
This trend mirrors the pattern observed from 2022 to 2023, where there was a drop of 0.6 percentage points, with total tax revenue falling from 35.9% to the previous 35.3%.
Conversely, there had been an increase in the tax burden on the national GDP, with the ratio rising from 35.1% in 2021 to 35.9% in 2022.
The OECD statistics include definitive data on public revenues for 2023 and provisional data for 2024, a year in which, according to the organization, “many OECD countries adopted measures to increase revenues in response to short- and long-term spending pressures.”
The decline observed in Portugal in 2024 ran counter to the trend seen across the OECD countries with available data, where “the average tax-to-GDP ratio increased by 0.3 percentage points,” from 33.7% in 2023 to 34.1% in 2024.
“This is the first year that the tax-to-GDP ratio has increased since 2021, raising the average ratio among the 38 countries studied in this report to the highest level ever,” noted the organization.
In this report, contributions paid to social security by companies and workers are also considered part of the tax values.
Among OECD countries, the tax burden on GDP varied from 18.3% in Mexico to 45.2% in Denmark in 2024.
Provisional data indicate an increase in the tax burden relative to GDP for 2023 “in 22 of the 36 countries for which preliminary data are available,” while there was a decrease in 13 countries, and one country recorded unchanged values.
“The largest increase in 2024 was observed in Latvia, where the tax-to-GDP ratio increased by 2.4 percentage points due to rises in income tax, social security contributions, and corporate income tax as a percentage of GDP. The second-largest increase occurred in Slovenia, where tax revenue increased by 1.9 percentage points due to higher social security contributions,” the OECD indicates.
Conversely, the largest decline from 2023 to 2024 was in Colombia, at 2.2 percentage points, due to a drop in corporate income tax revenue. South Korea and Norway also recorded declines exceeding one percentage point, noted the organization.
