Up until the end of November, road traffic authorities said they had registered 460 road deaths, which is up 53 on figures from the same period of last year.
Latest data from the National Road Safety Authority (ANSR) show the number of accidents, as well as serious and non-serious injuries, have also risen.
The increase is also the first in almost a decade.
The region worst affected by this spike in road fatalities is Setúbal, where deaths doubled over the first seven months of the year when compared with 2016.
The Algarve, while seeing the number of fatalities drop by one, has seen a massive increase in collisions this year, which are up by around 20 percent on last year.
With just over 10,000 accidents out of a resident population of 400,000, the Algarve is the region with the third highest number of accidents in Portugal, behind Lisbon and Porto.
Portugal’s most prominent national car association, the Automóvel Clube de Portugal (Automobile Club of Portugal - ACP), had already warned of deteriorating figures, and this summer slammed the Portuguese government’s approach to road safety, saying “it is not a priority” for the State.
The ACP said at the time that national awareness-raising campaigns about road safety are urgently needed, as is an “effective inspection” of driving education.
“Road accidents have increased at a worrying rate this year, without the Government having realised it and without taking structural measures to combat this problem”, the ACP said.
The car club’s comments came after the State Secretary for Home Affairs, Jorge Gomes, said he had ordered “more awareness-raising and inspection actions” aimed at drivers, to stop the increase of accidents.
This comes after another set of figures showed that around 5,500 people died in traffic accidents on the country’s roads between 2010 and November 2017.
The monetary cost of these accidents has also come at a price, with an estimated impact of 15 billion euros on the Portuguese economy.
Over this period, there were also 16,000 serious injuries and a further 300,000 slight injuries. Despite these numbers, Portugal has seen a reduction of almost 40 percent in road deaths since 2010, which is set to change for the first time this year due to the above-mentioned dismal figures.