Among EU Children, Family Incomes Are Most Unequal in Bulgaria

How far apart children's households are

This study measures how unevenly income is spread among the children of each Member State. Eurostat assigns every person under 18 the disposable income of the household he or she lives in — what the household has after taxes and social benefits — adjusted for the number of people it has to support, and then computes a Gini coefficient across all the children in the country.

The Gini coefficient is a standard single-number summary of income inequality. On the scale Eurostat publishes, 0 would mean that every child lived in a household with exactly the same adjusted income, and 100 that a single household held all of it. Between those poles the coefficient equals half the average income difference between two children picked at random, expressed as a percentage of average income. The higher the number, the further apart a country's children live.

The figures come from EU-SILC, the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, the annual household survey behind the Union's income and poverty indicators. Across the EU in 2025 the coefficient for children was 28.6. For the whole population, children included, it was 29.2.

Lower inequality among children in 19 Member States

The EU difference of 0.6 points is modest, and most national figures point the same way. In 19 of the 27 Member States the coefficient for children is below the one for the population as a whole; the differences quoted here are computed by subtracting the second from the first.

Denmark shows the widest difference: 23.3 among children against 28.2 for everyone, 4.9 points apart. Latvia follows at 4.1 points, with 31.5 against 35.6, and Sweden at 3.1, with 25.5 against 28.6. The Netherlands and Belgium are each 2.8 points lower for children.

Latvia shows how far the two measures can drift apart. On the population-wide coefficient it is the second most unequal Member State, behind Bulgaria. Among children it shares fifth place with Greece.

The two coefficients are not computed over the same households. The population-wide figure includes every kind of household — pensioners living alone, students, single adults, couples whose children have left — while the children's figure counts only the under-18s, and so only the households they live in. How much of each national difference comes from that, and how much from the incomes of families themselves, cannot be separated with these two numbers.

Eight Member States where inequality is higher among children

In eight Member States the coefficient is higher for children than for the whole population. Bulgaria leads by a distance: 41.4 among children against 37.7 overall, a difference of 3.7 points. Spain and Slovakia follow at 2.3 points each, then Romania at 1.5, Cyprus and Malta at 0.6, France at 0.3 and Czechia at 0.1. Greece, at 31.5 for children and 31.6 overall, is as near to level as one decimal place allows.

Bulgaria's figure stands out on each comparison made here. At 41.4 it stands 8.2 points above Lithuania, the next Member State at 33.2, and above the population-wide coefficient of every Member State, Bulgaria's own included. It has been the highest children's figure in the Union in eleven of the twelve years published; the exception is 2015, when Lithuania recorded 41.4.

Second place is less settled. Lithuania's 33.2 is a provisional value, and Spain's 33.1 is a tenth of a point behind it.

The most equal country overall, and its children

Slovakia has the lowest population-wide coefficient in the EU, at 23.0. Among its children the figure is 25.3, and six Member States record a lower one: Poland, Czechia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Belgium. Distributing income more evenly than any other Member State across the whole population does not, in Slovakia's case, carry over to the under-18s.

Belgium is the reverse. Its population-wide figure of 23.4 is the second lowest in the Union, and its children's figure of 20.6 is the lowest. The 2025 figure is the first in the series to put Belgium in that position: until 2024 the lowest value belonged to Finland, Slovenia, Slovakia or Denmark. Slovenia follows Belgium at 22.6, then the Netherlands at 23.1.

Twelve years of the children's figure

The children's series used here begins in 2014, and every change quoted in this section is the difference between two published values, computed here. The EU figure was 30.4 in that first year and 28.6 in 2025, the lowest of the twelve values. Eurostat flags a break in the EU series in 2020, meaning a change in how the figures are produced, and the German, French, Danish, Irish and Luxembourgish series break in the same year, so the two ends of the EU series are not strictly comparable.

Romania moved furthest. Its coefficient for children was 37.6 in 2014, peaked at 38.9 in 2016 and was down to 28.8 by 2025, a fall of 8.8 points and the largest in the Union. In five of the six years from 2016 to 2021 Romania had the second highest figure in the EU; in 2025 it sits beside the EU figure. Poland fell by 7.5 points, from 32.1 to 24.6, Greece by 6.2, Latvia by 5.9 and Portugal by 5.2. None of those five series carries a break flag at any point from 2014 to 2025.

Across the 27, the 2025 figure is below the 2014 one in 19 Member States, above it in seven, and unchanged in Sweden at 25.5. Ten Member States have at least one break in their series after 2014, and for them the comparison is indicative rather than exact.

France has the largest rise, from 26.5 to 30.7, which took it from below the EU figure to above it. Both of its large steps up fall in break years: from 26.5 in 2019 to 29.4 in 2020, and from 29.6 in 2021 to 31.2 in 2022. Cyprus, up 3.4 points to 31.8, has the largest rise in a series with no break; Finland rose by 2.1, Malta by 1.2 and Austria by 1.1. Bulgaria rose by 3.0, across a break in 2016.

What the coefficient does not say

A Gini coefficient describes the shape of a distribution and nothing about its level. Each country's children are measured against one another, so Bulgaria's 41.4 and Belgium's 20.6 say how far apart children are inside each country, not how well off they are. A child in the middle of Bulgaria's distribution and a child in the middle of Belgium's are each placed among their own country's children, and neither figure says how the two incomes compare. A companion study on this site looks at children from another angle, counting the share at risk of poverty or social exclusion rather than measuring how far apart they are.

The coefficient also reacts more to changes in the middle of a distribution than to changes at its ends. Two countries with the same value can differ in how far their poorest children fall behind the rest, and a single number cannot show where along the distribution a country's inequality sits.