A total of 3,295 teachers and preschool educators retired during the 2025/26 school year, according to Público. That's below the roughly 3,700 who retired the year before, Público reported.
The government introduced a bonus of €750 gross per month for teachers who choose to keep working past retirement eligibility. More than 2,000 teachers postponed retirement while the incentive was available, at a cost to the state of roughly €10 million, according to Público's reporting, cited by Observador.
Retirements weren't spread evenly across the school year. CNN Portugal, also citing Público, reported that 384 teachers retired in September 2025 alone, with monthly figures holding around 400 through the following months, before dropping to a low of 112 in June 2026. Another 557 retirements are expected in September 2026, outside this year's count.
The staffing gap is expected to persist through 2034/35. A joint study by Portugal's education statistics directorate, DGEEC, and Nova School of Business and Economics projects that public schools in mainland Portugal will need about 38,000 new teachers by the 2034/35 school year. That amounts to roughly 3,800 new teachers a year. The study estimates the current pipeline will produce only about 20,000 new graduates over the same period, leaving a substantial gap between projected need and expected supply.
Of Portugal's roughly 122,000 active teachers, only about 76,000 are projected to remain active by 2034/35, a decline of roughly 37%, according to the same study. The shortage is expected to be most acute in Portuguese and mathematics at the secondary level, Observador reported.