Statistics Portugal releases, for the first time, estimates for the road traffic made by vehicles with national register. This publication no longer qualifies within the scope of experimental studies published in StatsLab – developing statistics – and starts integrating the regular statistical production of the Institute. The new information provides a data series starting in 2015, allowing the analysis of road traffic throughout the last decade, by type of vehicle and type of fuel.
The results presented here enable the characterization of traffic trends by different types of Portuguese-registered vehicles subject to periodic inspection and constitute a new source of information for monitoring the road mobility in Portugal.
In 2025, it is estimated that 80.7 billion vehicle-km (vkm) were covered by the national stock of vehicles (+2.0% compared to 2024, +10.2% compared to 2015, first year of the series available). The movement of light passenger vehicles represented 75.2% of the total traffic (+0.7 p.p. in comparison to 2024 and +5.3% in comparison to 2015), while light freight vehicles represented 16.8% (-0.8 p.p.; -5.7 p.p. compared to 2015).
The movement of combustion vehicles registered a reduction, both in diesel (-0.7%), to 56.7 billion vehicle-km, and in petrol (-1.0%), to 16.3 billion vehicle-km. Those values corresponded to, respectively, 70.2% (-1.9 p.p.) and 20.1% (-0.6 p.p.) of the total of vehicle-km.
