More than one in four Europeans cannot afford a week’s holiday

Brussels – Holidays are becoming an increasingly rare luxury for some Europeans. In 2025, 27.5 per cent of European Union citizens were unable to afford one week of annual holiday away from home, according to data published by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office.

 Compared with 2024, the figure has risen by 0.5 percentage points, indicating a slight deterioration in the situation. Looking at the long term, however, the figure shows a marked improvement: compared with 2015, the percentage of people who cannot afford a week’s holiday has fallen by 7.7 percentage points. In total, compared with the 2025 population, there are 124,297,336 Europeans who have been forced to stay at home because they cannot afford the cost of accommodation and travel. 

The greatest difficulties are in Romania, where more than half the population – 61.4 per cent – cannot afford a week’s holiday away from home. Greece follows (46.6 per cent), while Bulgaria and Hungary share the same figure, at 39.1 per cent.

 Italy, too, ranks above the European average. In 2025, 35.7 per cent of Italians said they could not afford a week’s holiday away from home, highlighting how the cost of holidays continues to be a barrier for more than one in three citizens. This represents a deterioration of 4.3 percentage points compared with the Italian figure for 2024, when 31.4 per cent of Italian citizens stated that they could not leave home for seven days. In total, there are over 21 million people in Italy who cannot afford a week’s holiday away from home. These are certainly not encouraging figures for a G7 member country. 

At the other end of the scale, however, are the countries with the lowest incidence of this form of economic deprivation. In Luxembourg, the figure falls to 10.6 per cent, followed by Sweden (12.4 per cent) and the Netherlands (12.8 per cent), confirming that households in these countries are better able to afford leisure spending.