Bulgarians quit parental home at average age of just younger than 29 – Eurostat
Bulgarian young adults leave the parental home at an average age of 28.9 years, European Union statistics agency Eurostat said on May 15.
There is a gender split: on average, Bulgarian women leave the parental home when they are 26 and a half years old, while Bulgarian men stay on until just older than 31.
The Bulgarian average age for leaving is a few years above the average age – 26 – in the EU, the statistics agency said, while noting that there were “significant discrepancies” among the bloc’s member states.
In the EU, more than one young adult out of four (28.5 per cent) aged 25 to 34 were still living with their parents in 2016. Across the EU, this share ranged from less than 10 per cent in the Nordic EU countries – Denmark (3.8 per cent), Finland (4.3 per cent) and Sweden (six per cent) – to about half in Croatia (58.7 per cent), Slovakia (55.5 per cent), Greece (55 per cent), Malta (51.5 per cent) and Italy (48.9 per cent).
In 2017 in the EU, young people left home earliest in the three Nordic member states – Sweden (21 years), Denmark (21.1 years) and Finland (21.9 years) – as well as in Luxembourg (21.4 years). They were followed by those in Estonia (23.1 years), Belgium (23.4 years), the Netherlands (23.6 years), Germany (23.7), France (24 years) and the United Kingdom (24.4 years).
At the opposite end of the scale, young adults in Malta and Croatia remained the longest in the parental household. They left home at an average age of 32.2 and 31.9, respectively. Young adults in Slovakia (30.8 years), Italy (30.1 years), Greece (29.4 years), Spain (29.3 years), Portugal (29.2 years) and Bulgaria (28.9 years) also left the parental home at a later stage.
In every EU country, young women tended to leave the parental household earlier than men. The highest differences between the genders were registered in Romania (25.6 years for women, compared with 30.3 for men), Bulgaria (26.5 vs. 31.1), Croatia (30.4 vs. 33.4), Slovakia (29.4 vs. 32.2), Hungary (26 vs. 28.8), Greece (28 vs. 30.7) and the Czech Republic (25.1 vs. 27.7).
(Image: Daniel Wildman)
