For many households, the largest expenditure each month relates to housing costs.
Housing affordability can be analyzed through the housing cost overburden rate. This rate shows the share of the population living in households which spend 40% or more of their disposable income on housing.
The housing cost overburden rate was 7.8% in the EU in 2020 with large differences between Member States. Rates below 5% were recorded in 13 Member States, with the lowest shares in Cyprus (1.9%), Lithuania (2.7%), Malta (2.8%) and Slovakia (3.2%). At the other end of the scale, rates above 10% were recorded in Denmark (14.1%) and Bulgaria (14.4%), with the highest rate recorded in Greece (33.3%).
