A Quarter of Greeks Spend More Than 40% of Income on Housing

A threshold, not a scale

The housing cost overburden rate counts people whose housing costs exceed 40% of their disposable income, after housing allowances are deducted. It is a threshold measure: someone at 39% is not counted and someone at 41% is.

Across the EU in 2025, 7.7% of the population was above it.

Greece far ahead, Denmark second

Greece records 26.4%, far ahead of Denmark in second place at 14.7% and Germany in third at 11.2%.

Eurostat flags the Danish value as a break in series, so it is not strictly comparable with earlier years. The eleven years before it were steady: Denmark recorded between 14.1% and 15.7% in every year from 2014 to 2024, including 14.6% in 2024, and the 2025 reading falls inside that range.

Greece and Denmark reach the top by opposite routes.

Greek housing costs are not high by European standards; Greek incomes are low. The Greek at-risk-of-poverty rate is among the Union's highest, and Greek labour costs have risen more slowly than almost anywhere else in the Union — unit labour costs 10.6% above their 2020 level against an EU average of 19.1%, the second-lowest increase of the twenty-seven Member States, after Cyprus. A moderate housing cost against a low income crosses the 40% line easily.

That is a cost per unit of output and not a wage: it rises when pay outpaces productivity and falls when productivity outpaces pay, so it is evidence about Greek costs rather than a direct measurement of Greek pay. The unit labour cost study on this site sets out what it does and does not say.

Denmark is the reverse. Danish incomes are among the highest in the Union, and Danish housing costs are higher still. Denmark also has a large rental sector, and renters at market prices are the group this indicator picks up: owners with a paid-off mortgage have low housing costs by construction, so a country of owner-occupiers records a low rate almost automatically. That is why Denmark is the Union's second-highest on this measure, as it was in 2024.

The home ownership study on this site records the tenure split that sits underneath this.

An average above almost everyone

Only seven of the twenty-seven Member States are above the EU rate of 7.7%. Twenty are below it.

That distribution means the EU figure is not a typical national value. The seven above it are Greece, Denmark, Germany, Sweden at 10.8%, Estonia at 8.8%, Czechia at 8.2% and Luxembourg at 8.1%, and the weight in the average is Germany's: it has both a large population and a large rental sector.

Anyone reading 7.7% as the European norm is reading an average that three quarters of the Member States sit below.

The low end and what it conceals

Cyprus records 2.4%, Croatia 3.2%, Slovakia 3.5% and Slovenia 3.5%.

Some of them have very high home ownership, and in several cases high rates of ownership without a mortgage. A household that owns its home outright has almost no housing cost in this measure, whatever the house is worth.

That is the indicator's main blind spot. It measures the flow of housing payments, not the difficulty of acquiring housing in the first place. A country where young people cannot buy and stay with their parents instead will record an excellent overburden rate, and the overcrowding study on this site shows what that looks like from the other side.