The overcrowding rate is the percentage of persons living in dwellings with not enough rooms in view of the number of household members.

DATA DOWNLOAD
SiStat Database

INDICATOR DESCRIPTION
The overcrowding rate is the percentage of persons living in dwellings with not enough rooms in view of the number of household members. The condition for a dwelling to be overcrowded is that it does not have one room per household and at the same time one room per couple in the household, one room for each single person aged 18 or more, one room per pair of single persons of the same gender between 12 and 17 years of age, one room for each single person between 12 and 17 years of age and not included in the previous category, and one room per pair of children under 12 years of age.

With the SILC survey for 2011 the methodology of calculating the indicator changed, so the data from 2011 on are not comparable with the data for the previous years. Until 2010 a kitchen was not counted as a room, whereas from 2011 on a kitchen is counted as a room if it measures at least 6 square metres and the household uses it as a dining room, a living room, a study, etc.

Densely populated areas are cities, intermediate density areas are towns and suburbs and thinly populated areas are rural areas.

UNIT
Percentage of population

DATA SOURCE
Eurostat
Publishing frequency: annually
Indicative date of publication: April
Link to more data: SiStat Database (Theme: Quality of Life; Sub-theme: Level of Living), Eurostat database

The data enable the display of distributions by: gender, age, household type, accommodation tenure status, income quintiles, cohesion regions, statistical regions

Link to methodological explanations: Living Conditions: Questionnaires, methodological explanations, quality reports (Theme: Quality of Life; Sub-theme: Income, Poverty and Social Exclusion), Eurostat metadata

LAST UPDATE OF THE METADATA
20 December 2023