About 92.7 million people in the EU were at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2025, representing 20.9%.
The risk was unevenly spread across the bloc’s regions, with 24 out of 243 areas reporting that at least 31.5% of residents were at risk, Eurostat reported on Friday.
These regions were mainly in southern, eastern and outermost parts of the EU, including five regions in Spain; four each in Bulgaria, Greece and Italy; three outermost regions in France; and two regions in Romania.
Two predominantly urban regions in western EU countries were also in this higher-risk group: the Belgian capital region, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale / Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, and Bremen in north-western Germany.
In five regions, the share of people at risk was more than double the EU average.
The highest figure was recorded in Guyane — an outermost region of France in South America — where 54.8% of the population was at risk.
Calabria and Sicilia in southern Italy followed with 45.3% and 44.0% respectively, while Ciudad de Melilla, an autonomous Spanish region on the north coast of Africa, recorded 43.7%, and the French outermost region of La Réunion stood at 42.3%.
Lowest-risk regions concentrated in capitals and parts of northern Europe
At the other end of the scale, 24 regions across the EU recorded fewer than 13.0% of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2025, Eurostat said.
That group included five capital regions — Bratislavský kraj (Slovakia), Warszawski stołeczny (Poland), Praha (Czechia), Budapest (Hungary) and Grad Zagreb (Croatia) — as well as six regions in northern Italy, four additional regions in Czechia, four regions in northern Belgium, two additional regions each in Hungary and Poland, and one region in Austria.
Eurostat published the figures ahead of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on 17 October.
