Analysis / 02
One in six working-age Romanians lives elsewhere in Europe.
Free movement is used very unevenly. For some member states, a tenth or more of their working-age citizens live in another European country; for nearly half, it is under one in twenty-five. The growth of the 2010s has slowed, and the employment advantage of leaving has narrowed where home labour markets recovered.
Eurostat publishes how many citizens of each country, aged 20 to 64, usually live in another EU or EFTA country. On its own that is a head-count: 2.4 million Romanians, 1.2 million Italians, 1.1 million Poles. To compare countries of different sizes I divide it by all working-age citizens the survey can see, at home and abroad. The result reads as a plain sentence: of every hundred working-age citizens of country X living in the EU or EFTA, this many live outside X.
A handful of countries account for the extremes
In 2024 the share was 17.5% for Romania, 16.0% for Croatia, 12.9% for Bulgaria and 12.4% for Portugal. Luxembourg, small and surrounded, is at 11.5%. Then come the three Baltic states, each a little above 8%. At the other end, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Czechia and Finland are all under 2%.
The direction since 2010 is almost uniformly upwards. Bulgaria’s share more than doubled, Latvia’s rose two and a half times, Hungary’s almost fourfold, and Spain’s head-count abroad grew from 254,000 to 461,000. Portugal is the exception among the high-mobility countries: it started the period at 11.4% and has barely moved. Finland is the only country where the share clearly fell.
East and south-east Europe sent the most; almost everyone sent more than in 2010
Citizens aged 20–64 living in another EU/EFTA country, as a share of all such citizens living in the EU/EFTA (at home or abroad). Ring: 2010. Red dot and figure: 2024.
Source: author’s calculation from Eurostat lfst_lmbpcita (citizens residing in another EU/EFTA country) and lfsa_pganws (nationals in private households in the reporting country). Cyprus, Denmark and Malta lack one of the two series in 2024 and are omitted. The United Kingdom is not a country of residence in this dataset, so citizens living there are not counted in any year.
The 2010s were the decade of growth
For the EU as a whole the share rose from 2.9% in 2010 to 4.1% in 2019, and then by only a quarter of a point in the five years to 2024. Poland shows the turn most clearly: its share peaked at 5.0% in 2019, fell during the pandemic and has only just returned to that level. Choose a country below to follow its line against all the others.
One caution applies to every line. The Labour Force Survey was redesigned in 2021, and Eurostat flags a break in series for every country that year. Movements across 2020–2021 mix real change with a change of instrument, so I compare 2010 with 2019 and 2021 with 2024 when I want a clean reading.
Fast growth to 2019, then a plateau
Share of working-age citizens living in another EU/EFTA country, 2010–2024. Red: selected country. Black: EU-27. Grey: all other countries. Hollow points are flagged by Eurostat as low reliability.
Source: as Fig. 1. Gaps are years in which Eurostat does not publish the value (in 2012 for Austria, Czechia, Italy, Romania, Slovenia and the EU aggregate). Bulgaria’s home population series also has a break in 2019.
Are those who left more likely to be in work?
Usually, but less than before, and not everywhere. In 2024, 78.1% of mobile EU citizens aged 20–64 were employed, against 76.6% of nationals living in their own country. That 1.5-point advantage was 3.0 points in 2019.
The country pattern is the more informative one. Citizens of Italy, Greece and Croatia who live abroad have employment rates around ten points or more above their compatriots at home. For Sweden, the Netherlands and Estonia the sign is reversed: people at home are more likely to be employed than those abroad. Hungary shows how quickly the gap can close. In 2010 Hungarians abroad were ten points ahead; by 2024 the home employment rate had risen from 59.9% to 81.2% and the difference had almost disappeared. Use the slider to move through the years.
None of this measures the effect of moving. People who emigrate differ from those who stay in age, education and occupation, and the comparison is between two groups, not between two outcomes for the same person.
Leaving pays most, in employment terms, for citizens of countries with weak labour markets at home
Employment rate, ages 20–64. Red: citizens living in another EU/EFTA country. Blue: nationals living at home. Figure: gap in percentage points. Ordered by the 2024 gap.
Source: Eurostat lfst_lmbercita (employment rate of citizens residing in another EU/EFTA country) and lfsa_ergan (employment rate of nationals in the reporting country). Hollow red points are flagged as low reliability. Cyprus, Denmark and Malta are omitted for lack of data.
The ratio. Share abroad = A ÷ (A + H), where A is citizens of a country aged 20–64 usually resident in another EU-27 or EFTA country, and H is nationals aged 20–64 in private households in that country. Eurostat’s own headline expresses A as a share of the home country’s resident population; mine is slightly different and the two should not be mixed.
Who is missing. Citizens living outside the EU and EFTA, including the United Kingdom, are not counted. For Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Ireland and Romania that is a large omission, and it makes these shares conservative. Both series come from a household sample survey, so recent arrivals and people in collective housing are under-covered, and small cells are unreliable; Eurostat suppresses or flags them and I have kept those flags.
Citizenship, not birthplace. People who naturalise in the country where they live leave the count. The figures describe a stock at a point in time and say nothing directly about flows or about how long people stay.
Data and code
- mobility.csv: head-counts, shares, employment rates, gaps and flags for every country and year
- Raw snapshots: lfst_lmbpcita.csv, lfsa_pganws.csv, lfst_lmbercita.csv, lfsa_ergan.csv
- build_data.py: the calculation
Eurostat data are reused under the European Commission’s reuse policy (CC BY 4.0), with the source acknowledged. Calculations and any errors are mine.