€1500 a month is €18K a year, I believe Portugal has about 28% income tax for €7-20K income bracket (which seems very high), so it is roughly about €25K before taxes.

And you are saying this is a good as it gets for Software Engineers. I was looking up real estate prices in Lisbon and they seemed pretty high. Per my understanding a lot of people from EU (and some outside of EU) are buying real estate in Portugal and that drives prices up. How do local people buy real estate then?

What websites do local people in Portugal use for real estate sales and rentals?

I would advise anyone to stay away from Lisbon regarding housing as there's some kind of bubble over here because of all the tourism. The rest of the country has saner prices, so if you don't really need to live in Lisbon, stay away from it..

Regarding locals, we have a problem which is that when daily workers leave Lisbon, you can only find the tourists looking at each other..

We do lease for everything, TV, computer, car, house, vacation, you name it.

Before the crisis you could get full credits, with 0% entry on your side.

It is also quite common to live with the parents and only leave when you eventually marry, with one salary being used to pay the bank and other running costs.

Or you get to buy a little piece of land with an house that gets built with lot of shortcuts along the years.

Not sure what the best websites are, as I am living abroad, however many local agencies lack Internet presence. The best sources are ads on local newspapers or word of mouth.

Let me correct your numbers. For 1500€ monthly net your employer will pay about 3000€ (~20% income tax + ~30% social security). Multiply by 14 (Yes there are 14 salaries in a year. Don't ask.) and the yearly gross is 42000€.

Edit: https://casa.sapo.pt/ for a look at the real estate market. "para venda" is for sale, "para alugar/aluguer" is for rent.

In Portugal, Social Security taxation for a full-time employee is 11%.

42000€ per year gross salary lands you in the 28.5% income tax.

A yearly gross salary of 42000€ is about +/- 1800€ salary/month.

You're apparently unaware that not all tax appears on your salary receipt. Employers have to pay 20% to SS, on top of the 11% that the employee pays. (This amount doesn't count toward your gross income for IRS purposes though, which is relevant to your point)

The distinction is largely a technicality, all the more because both parts of the SS contribution are paid by the employer directly to the state, but it does have one effect: because the 20% don't show up in the salary receipt, most portuguese people are, like you, blissfully unaware of what the real tax rate on their salaries is.

If companies all of the sudden didn't have to paid those 20% would I see that reflected on my paycheck? I bet you I wouldn't nor anyone else.

I've heard that falacy time and time again: "Oh, if I didn't have to pay so much taxes for each worker I could pay higher salaries."

You're responding to a statement I didn't make. I just corrected the common misconception that the SS tax is 11%, it's not, it's 34.75% [0]

What would happen if those taxes were lowered is for economists to speculate, I'm not one (even then, as the joke goes, put a question to two economists, get three different opinions)

[0] This conversation made go check the exact values, you can find them here: http://www.economias.pt/contribuicoes-para-a-seguranca-socia...

Local people will hardly ever buy a property within Lisbon center. Advantageous tax and citizenship acquiring policies for foreigners drived prices extremely high. Suburbs are the only solution as soon as you get a family and renting a room is not an option anymore.

Even renting is way harder right now. Landlords prefer to rent central properties via AirBnb than to make cheaper long term contracts.