More Than a Third of Dutch Adults Do Voluntary Work

Organised unpaid work

Formal voluntary activity means unpaid work carried out through an organisation: a charity, a sports club, a religious body, a rescue service. It excludes helping a neighbour directly, which is counted separately as informal help.

Across the EU in 2022, 12.3% of adults took part. Roughly one in eight.

A north-west to south-east gradient

The Netherlands records 36.0%, far ahead of Denmark at 26.0%, Luxembourg at 25.1%, Finland at 23.9% and Sweden at 22.1%.

Slovenia at 20.7% and Ireland at 20.5% follow, then Austria at 19.7%.

At the other end, Bulgaria records 3.0%, Romania 3.9%, Italy 5.3%, Hungary 5.8% and Latvia 6.2%.

The gradient runs from the north-west to the south-east with few exceptions, and Slovenia at sixth is the clearest of those exceptions.

Italy is the case worth naming

Italy records 5.3%, third from the bottom of the Union — below Poland, Greece, Portugal and Slovakia, and a seventh of the Dutch rate.

It was not there in 2015. On the same 26 Member States, Italy ranked fifteenth that year at 12.0% — mid-table, and almost exactly where the Union as a whole sits now. Between the two waves it lost 6.7 points, more than half its rate, and nine places.

That is not what the country's reputation for civic and religious association would predict, and it is not explained by income: Italy's GDP per capita is close to the EU average and well above every Member State ranked below it.

One partial explanation is definitional. This indicator counts activity organised through a formal body, and a country where mutual help runs through family and neighbourhood networks rather than registered organisations will record less of it while doing no less of it. Eurostat measures informal help separately for exactly this reason, and that series is not used here.

Whether that accounts for the Italian figure is not something this extraction can settle. It is a caution against reading the ranking as a measure of how much people help one another.

What the ranking is evidence about

Volunteering rates of this kind are usually taken as an indicator of civic infrastructure: whether a country has a dense layer of organisations that people can join, and whether joining them is a normal thing to do.

Read that way, the ranking describes the organisational landscape more than it describes generosity. The Netherlands does not have twelve times Bulgaria's supply of people willing to help. It has a very different density of organisations through which help is channelled and recorded.

The one comparison this series supports

The module has run twice, in 2015 and in 2022. Between those two waves the EU rate fell from 18.9% to 12.3%, a loss of 6.6 points and about a third of the level.

The fall is close to universal: 23 of the 26 Member States with a figure in both waves record less formal volunteering in 2022 than in 2015. Cyprus is the one appreciable rise, from 7.2% to 11.3%; Romania and Malta rose by less than a point. The largest falls are all at the top of the 2015 ranking — Sweden down 13.4 points, Denmark 12.7, Luxembourg 11.6, Finland 10.2, Slovenia 9.7 — so the countries that volunteered most are the ones that lost most. The Netherlands ranked first in both waves.

What that fall is cannot be settled from two observations seven years apart. A near-universal drop concentrated in the highest-participation countries is what a shared shock looks like, and the second wave was collected after 2020 and 2021; it is also what a change in how the question travels between waves would look like. This study reports the movement and does not explain it, and the figures remain a pair of snapshots rather than a trend — they should not be read alongside the annual indicators elsewhere on this site.