More EU Residence Permits Are Held for Family Reasons Than for Work

Permits held, not people arriving

A residence permit is any authorisation, valid for at least three months, that allows a citizen of a country outside the EU to live legally in a Member State. Eurostat counts the people holding one that is still valid on 31 December, whether it was issued that year, renewed or changed from an earlier permit, and records the reason it was granted for.

That makes the figure a stock, everyone holding a permit on a single day, rather than a flow of arrivals over the year. Someone who arrived ten years ago and still holds a permit is in it; someone who has since become a citizen of the country is not. Citizens of other Member States need no permit and never appear. Nor do the people living in the Union under temporary protection, the status activated in 2022 for those displaced from Ukraine: Eurostat treats it as administratively different and keeps it out of every residence permit table.

On 31 December 2025 the count stood at 27,768,258, up 4.6% on a year earlier. Germany alone holds 5,935,591, France 4,419,080, Spain 4,296,727 and Italy 4,257,673; together the four account for 68.1% of the EU total, while Luxembourg's 68,865 is the smallest national figure. A raw count says how many permits a country holds, not why they were granted, so this study compares something else: the reason written on the permit.

Family before work, across the Union

Family reasons cover 9,003,763 permits, 32.4% of the EU total and the largest of the categories Eurostat aggregates for the Union. Employment follows with 6,193,012, or 22.3%, and education with 1,293,664, or 4.7%. A further 7,182,001, or 25.9%, are recorded under other reasons. The rest are permits for refugee status and for subsidiary protection, the status given to people who do not qualify as refugees but would face serious harm if returned. No EU figure exists for either on its own: Eurostat computes an EU aggregate only when every Member State reports, and Spain, Hungary, Malta and Austria do not report both. Their combined total is fixed all the same, because the published aggregate leaves it over: 4,095,818 permits, or 14.7%, which is exactly the protection permits of the Member States that do report them. Read that as what the Union identifies rather than all it holds — in Austria, Hungary and Malta the four categories above already exhaust the national total, so whatever protection those three grant is counted inside one of them.

The reason recorded is the one on the permit valid at the end of the year. A student who stays on to work and receives a work permit is counted under employment; a worker joined by a spouse adds a family permit, not a second work one.

Where most permits are for family

Belgium has the highest family share in the EU at 56.2%, followed by Luxembourg at 51.5% and Sweden at 51.1%. Those three are the only Member States where family accounts for more than half of all valid permits. Italy at 40.2%, Finland at 38.5%, Spain at 37.4% and Germany at 36.9% come next.

Family is the largest single reason in six Member States: the three above, Finland, Germany and Czechia. The Czech case is close to a tie, with 172,676 family permits against 172,327 under other reasons, a margin of 349.

At the other end, five Member States record a family share below 10%: Lithuania at 9.7%, Croatia at 9.4%, Slovenia at 8.5%, Latvia at 8.0% and Estonia at 7.1%. They reach that figure by two different routes, described below.

Where most permits are for work

In Croatia 79.0% of valid permits are held for employment, the highest share in the Union. Lithuania follows at 68.1%, Romania at 65.5%, Malta at 65.2%, Slovakia at 59.3% and Poland at 57.0%: six Member States where work accounts for more than half.

Work is the largest single reason in ten Member States, every one of them in the south or the east of the Union. Beyond the six, Hungary records 43.9%, Portugal 43.1%, Italy 42.6% and Cyprus 39.8%. Italy holds the largest number of work permits in absolute terms, 1,812,383, just ahead of its 1,712,906 family permits. In Croatia and Lithuania, by contrast, family permits are below a tenth of the total: there the low family share is the other side of a permit stock made up mostly of workers.

This site's study of the migrant employment gap looks at several of the same countries from the side of the labour market. It classifies people by country of birth, while this one counts permits by citizenship, so the two describe overlapping rather than identical populations and neither can be read as a test of the other.

Education, a small share almost everywhere

Education accounts for 4.7% of permits across the EU and for more than 10% in four Member States: Ireland at 19.0%, a figure Eurostat flags as of low reliability, Hungary at 17.5%, Slovakia at 11.3% and Finland at 10.5%. Greece at 0.3%, Croatia at 0.5% and Estonia at 0.6% record the lowest shares.

Germany, where protection outweighs family

Germany records 1,398,249 permits for refugee status and 1,263,385 for subsidiary protection. Together they make up 44.8% of Germany's valid permits, more than family's 36.9%. Of the 23 Member States that report both protection categories, it is the only one where the two combined outweigh every other reason.

Sweden follows at 20.4% for the two combined, then Belgium at 16.3%, the Netherlands at 16.0% and France at 14.4%. Spain reports refugee status but not subsidiary protection, and Hungary, Malta and Austria report neither, so their protection permits cannot be identified in the table.

Other reasons, a category with no breakdown

Other reasons cover 25.9% of permits across the EU, but in four Member States they are the majority: Estonia at 84.3%, Latvia at 83.7%, Austria at 74.3% and Slovenia at 64.1%. The table does not break the category down, so in those countries a ranking by family or work describes only a minority of the permits actually held. That is the second route to a low family share: there, a small family share may mean only that most permits carry a reason the table does not name.

Part of the category can be named. Citizens of the United Kingdom have counted as non-EU citizens since their country left the Union, and at the end of 2025 they held 919,297 valid permits, 3.3% of the EU total. Of those, 738,657 sit under other reasons, which is 10.3% of the whole category. In Spain the proportion is higher: 347,685 of its 1,877,269 permits for other reasons are held by UK citizens, 18.5%.

A larger total, a smaller family share

At the end of 2014 the EU count was 17,215,822. By the end of 2025 it had risen by 10,552,436, or 61.3%, growing in every year but one: the count at the end of 2020 was 207,553 below the one a year earlier. Over the same period the family share fell from 39.9% to 32.4%, and education permits more than doubled, from 613,449 to 1,293,664.

The largest single-year rise came between 2020 and 2021, when the total grew by 2,466,527. The transition period that followed the United Kingdom's departure ended on 31 December 2020, the date of the first of those two counts, and by the end of 2021 UK citizens held 863,242 valid permits. The increase is not theirs alone, and several national series break in other years, where a country changed how it compiles its count, so the long comparison describes direction more safely than size.