Where Heating Breaks the Budget

More than one quarter of the Bulgarian population isn't able to properly heat their homes according to data from Eurostat. With a share of 27.5 percent, the Balkan state tops the EU average by almost 20 percent as our chart shows.

Bulgaria is followed by Lithuania with 23.1 percent and Cyprus with 20.9 percent. Most countries on this top list are among the lower rungs of the ladder when it comes to economic power, but there are two major exceptions: Spain and Germany. While the former had a GDP of 1.3 trillion euros in 2020, one in ten residents isn't able to properly heat their home due to financial reasons. Even Germany, the biggest economy in the EU, has a share of nine percent of the population who couldn't afford proper heating in 2020.

While these numbers might seem high at first glance, the percentage shares of people not being able to afford heating have actually gone down in most countries. For example, Bulgaria stood at almost 40 percent in 2016. A similar development can be seen in Greece, which almost halved the share of its population who can't afford proper heating from 29.1 percent in 2016 to 16.7 percent in 2020. On the other side of the spectrum, Spain and Germany again stand out on this list. In 2019, 2.5 percent of Germans and 7.5 percent of Spaniards assessed they didn't have the finances to properly heat their home.

While there's no way to pinpoint one reason for the jump in these two countries, the coronavirus pandemic likely played a big part due to the job insecurities it created even in richer nations around the globe. With the energy price hike in 2021 and the fallout of Russia's aggression towards Ukraine, the numbers for last year and this year are bound to rise again across the EU.