Half of Romanians live in overcrowded households, the highest percent in EU

Romania is the European Union member state with the highest share of its population living in overcrowded households, of 48.4 percent in 2016, according to Eurostat.

“Across Member States, almost half the population in Romania (48.4 percent) were living in overcrowded households in 2016. This was also the case for around two in every five persons in Latvia (43.2 percent), Bulgaria (42.5 percent), Croatia (41.1 percent), Poland (40.7 percent), Hungary (40.4 percent) and Slovakia (37.9 percent), and for around one in four in Greece (28.7 percent), Italy (27.8 percent) and Lithuania (23.7 percent),” Eurostat said.

Romania is the EU member state with the highest share of the population living in overcrowded dwelings. Data source: Eurostat

At the opposite end of the scale, the lowest overcrowding rates were recorded in Cyprus (2.4 percent), Malta (2.9 percent), Ireland (3.2 percent), Belgium (3.7 percent) and the Netherlands (4 percent).

According to Eurostat, a person is considered as living in an overcrowded household if the household does not have at its disposal a minimum of one room, one room per couple, one room for each single person aged 18 or more, one room per pair of single people of the same gender between 12 and 17 years of age and one room per pair of children under 12 years of age.

Romania is also the EU member state with the lowest share – 6.3 percent – of its population living in under-occupied dwellings, followed by Hungary (8.5 percent), Latvia (9.6 percent) and Greece (10.2 percent).