Europe / Housing & income
Overcrowding across the EU’s income divide
In 2025, 29.8% of people below their national at-risk-of-poverty threshold lived in overcrowded households, versus 14.3% above it. All 27 EU countries are shown, including the reversed comparisons in Croatia and Lithuania.
A divide, with exceptions.
Across the EU, 29.8% of people below their national threshold lived in overcrowded households, compared with 14.3% of people above it. The difference is 15.5 percentage points. The all-income EU rate is 16.8%.
Sweden has the largest observed country point-estimate gap in this snapshot: 41.2% below versus 11.0% above. This is not a statistically established ranking.
The comparison also has exceptions. Croatia is 26.9% below versus 33.0% above; Lithuania is 25.8% versus 28.4%, with provisional figures. These observations do not establish what caused the differences.
The complete comparison
All 27 countries and the EU aggregate
| Country | Below (%) | Above (%) | Gap (pp) |
|---|---|---|---|
| EU · 27 countries | 29.8 | 14.3 | +15.5 |
| Sweden | 41.2 | 11.0 | +30.2 |
| Austria | 37.5 | 9.8 | +27.7 |
| Slovakia | 52.1 | 24.4 | +27.7 |
| Czechia | 39.9 | 14.2 | +25.7 |
| Finland | 30.5 | 6.2 | +24.3 |
| France | 27.5 | 7.6 | +19.9 |
| Germany | 27.4 | 8.8 | +18.6 |
| Belgium | 22.8 | 4.6 | +18.2 |
| Denmark | 25.7 | 7.8 | +17.9 |
| Hungary | 28.7 | 12.3 | +16.4 |
| Luxembourg† | 22.6 | 6.4 | +16.2 |
| Romania | 52.6 | 37.7 | +14.9 |
| Italy | 35.2 | 21.8 | +13.4 |
| Estonia | 27.3 | 15.7 | +11.6 |
| Netherlands | 13.4 | 2.8 | +10.6 |
| Spain | 17.9 | 7.4 | +10.5 |
| Portugal | 21.3 | 11.1 | +10.2 |
| Bulgaria | 40.3 | 30.4 | +9.9 |
| Greece | 35.3 | 26.6 | +8.7 |
| Poland | 38.2 | 29.8 | +8.4 |
| Ireland | 11.4 | 4.5 | +6.9 |
| Slovenia | 16.3 | 9.5 | +6.8 |
| Cyprus | 7.6 | 1.2 | +6.4 |
| Latvia | 42.2 | 37.9 | +4.3 |
| Malta | 7.7 | 4.1 | +3.6 |
| Lithuania* | 25.8 | 28.4 | −2.6 |
| Croatia | 26.9 | 33.0 | −6.1 |
* Lithuania: provisional. † Luxembourg: break in time series. Flags apply to total, above and below series. The all-income rate is also retained in the CSV.
Source, scope & uncertainty
Eurostat EU-SILC survey reference year 2025; income reference year 2024. The saved source was accessed on 29 October 2026 and its updated field is 20 October 2026. These are not 2026 housing observations.
Each percentage describes people within the specified income group living in overcrowded private households. The threshold is 60% of national median equivalised disposable income after social transfers. Countries do not share a common cash poverty line. Source categories are Above 60% (A_60) and Below 60% (B_60); no additional endpoint convention is inferred.
Overcrowding follows Eurostat’s room-based standard for household size and composition. It is not a measure of floor area, urban density, rents or homelessness. Collective and institutional households and people without private-household accommodation are generally outside EU-SILC coverage.
All 27 EU member countries are shown. The EU row is Eurostat’s separately published EU27_2020 aggregate, not an unweighted country mean. Countries are ordered by the below-minus-above percentage-point gap; source rates are unchanged and no values are interpolated.
Lithuania is provisional (p) in all three series. Luxembourg has a break-in-time-series flag (b) in all three series; this chart does not compare years. The dataset-linked Hungary note concerns 2019–2024 revisions and does not identify a separate flag for this 2025 cross-section.
These are descriptive point estimates, not causal effects. Sampling uncertainty and differences in household composition, age, tenure and other characteristics may affect comparisons. No confidence intervals are supplied in this extraction; no statistically significant ranking or universal income relationship is claimed. Croatia and Lithuania have reverse-direction comparisons.
Source: Eurostat, ilc_lvho05a, accessed 29 October 2026. Meplar selected the EU observations, calculated the gap and created the visualisation. Eurostat is not responsible for the selection, calculations, visualisation or commentary. The public JSON-stat snapshot is an explicitly labelled EU-only modification of the original response; the original hash is retained in provenance.
- Eurostat dataset: overcrowding by age, sex and poverty status (ilc_lvho05a)
- Eurostat dataset DOI
- Eurostat definition of overcrowding and full room rules
- Eurostat at-risk-of-poverty rate definition
- EU-SILC metadata: reference periods, coverage and uncertainty
- Dataset-linked Hungary information note, 2019–2024 revisions
- Eurostat copyright notice and data reuse conditions
Reproduction & reuse
The fixed-version ZIP contains an EU-only source snapshot, unchanged selected rates and flags, derived gaps, artwork and offline reproduction code.
