Fewer than one in four households in the EU included children in 2025.
Out of 203.1 million households across the bloc, 47.4 million — or 23.4% — had children living in them, the EU’s statistical office said. Most households with children were couples with children (14.7% of all households), followed by other household types with children (5.6%) and single adults with children (3.0%).
Households without children made up the remaining 76.6% and were most commonly single adults (37.5% of all households), couples without children (24.1%) and other household types (15.1%.
Between 2016 and 2025, the number of single-adult households without children rose by 19.2% from 63.9 million to 76.1 million, while couples without children increased by 3.3% from 47.3 million to 48.9 million.
Over the same period, couples with children fell by 6.3% from 31.9 million to 29.9 million, and other household types with children decreased by 3.5% from 11.8 million to 11.4 million.
Wide differences between EU countries
The share of households with children ranged from 35.4% in Slovakia to 18.2% in Finland in 2025, the data showed.
Slovakia was followed by Ireland (30.8%) and Cyprus (28.2%), while Lithuania (18.4%) and Germany (19.9%) were also among the lowest.
Across the EU, just over half of households with children had one child (50.2%), while 37.6% had two children and 12.2% had three or more.
One-child households were most common among households with children in Portugal (61.8%), Bulgaria (60.4%) and Malta (59.5%).
In 14 of the EU’s 27 countries, most households with children had two or more children, with the highest shares recorded in Sweden (57.8%), the Netherlands (57.6%) and Ireland (56.7%).
