The Poorest 40% of Europeans Receive 21.9% of Income

A distribution measure with an obvious benchmark

Most inequality measures require explanation before a number means anything. This one does not. If income were shared equally, the poorest 40% of people would receive 40% of income. Whatever they actually receive, measured against 40, is the distance from equality.

Across the EU in 2025 they received 21.9%.

Slightly more than half of an equal share, for four Europeans in ten.

The most equal Member States

Czechia and Slovakia both record 25.2%, and Belgium 25.1%. Poland and Slovenia follow.

Czechia and Slovakia at the top is the result that separates this ranking from a ranking of national income. Neither is among the Union's wealthier Member States. Both distribute what they have more evenly than any of the countries that have more.

Belgium in third is the wealthy Member State that keeps company with them, and it is consistently near the top of European equality measures on any definition.

The least equal

Bulgaria records 17.7%, Latvia 18.1% and Lithuania 18.2%.

The same three Member States hold the top positions on the income quintile share ratio in the equality category of this site, which uses a different construction — the ratio of the top fifth to the bottom fifth — and reaches the same conclusion. When two measures with different arithmetic agree on the ordering, the ordering is a property of the distributions and not of the method.

Bulgaria is also the Member State with the lowest life satisfaction in the Union and the lowest volunteering rate. It is one of the few countries where the subjective and the distributional indicators point the same way.

The narrowness of the range

The full spread across the Union is 7.5 percentage points, from 17.7% to 25.2%.

By the standards of this site that is a narrow range. Energy import dependency spans 94 points, tourism intensity a factor of almost sixteen, childcare a factor of fifty-five. Income distribution varies far less between European countries than almost anything else measured about them.

That is worth stating because it cuts both ways. It means no Member State is an outlier in either direction, and it means no Member State is close to equality. The best-performing country in the Union gives its poorest 40% about five eighths of an equal share.

What the measure leaves out

This is disposable income after taxes and transfers, so it already includes the redistribution each Member State performs. It says nothing about wealth, which is distributed far more unequally than income everywhere it has been measured, and nothing about the market income distribution that tax and benefit systems act on.

Two countries with identical figures here can have very different market inequality and very different redistribution, and the indicator cannot distinguish a country that starts equal from one that is made equal.