Map of Europe with a small bar chart for each EU member state showing its largest household spending items, mostly housing and food

Household Spending in the EU

What do households in the EU spend their money on? This map shows how household consumption expenditure in the EU and its 27 member states is divided among twelve purposes, from housing, food and transport to restaurants, recreation and education, drawn as bar charts directly on the map.

Across the EU, housing, including water, electricity and gas, is by far the largest item: 24% of household spending in 2022. Food follows with 14%, then transport with 13%. Zooming in shows how differently the member states spend, and how their spending has shifted since 2012.

Reading the map

Zoomed out - one bar chart for the EU as a whole. Each bar is a purpose of spending, its height the purpose's share of total household spending.
Zooming in a little - next to each EU bar, the share of the same purpose ten years earlier.
Zooming in - a bar chart for each member state. Bars are sorted by share, largest first, and appear one by one as you zoom in. Below each bar, the icon of its purpose, which also appears in the key, shows long before there is room for the purpose's name.
Fully zoomed in - next to each bar, the share of the same purpose ten years earlier.
Year shown - 2022, the latest year with complete data for all member states, compared with 2012.

The figures follow the national accounts and cover all consumption expenditure of households, including the imputed rents of owner-occupiers under housing.

Data

Eurostat, Household final consumption expenditure by purpose (COICOP 1999) (nama_10_co3_p3), percentage of total. Source: https://doi.org/10.2908/NAMA_10_CO3_P3, accessed 2026-09-28. Reused under Eurostat's copyright notice. The data has been reformatted; the shares are shown unchanged. Eurostat is not responsible for this reuse of its data or for any conclusions drawn from it.