Living alone is not being isolated: what the European data shows

One number recurs in every conversation about ageing: how many older people live alone. It is easy to obtain, easy to quote, and it is what municipal programmes are designed around. The trouble is that it measures something else.

What the European data shows

In 2025, 32.2% of people aged 65 and over lived in single-person households in the European Union. The figure comes from Eurostat's dataset distributing the older population by household type, updated in May 2026.

The spread between countries is enormous, and wider than the spread in their ageing rates. Lithuania is at 59.9%, Denmark at 49.0%, Estonia at 45.5%. At the other end, Slovakia is at 7.4%, Cyprus at 19.1%, Poland at 22.2%. Eight times separates first from last.

This is not explained by northern countries having more older people. It is explained by how families organise themselves, by the size of homes, and by what each society treats as normal in old age.

Portugal is an exception, and that misleads

Portugal has 24.3% of its population aged 65 or over, making it the second-oldest country in the European Union, behind only Italy. That figure is also Eurostat's, updated in July 2026.

You would expect it near the top of the previous list. It sits 24th out of 30, at 25.7%, below the European average. Spain is lower still, at 22.8%. France, by contrast, is at 37.1%, Germany at 35.2% and Italy at 31.7%.

The comfortable reading would be that we age a great deal but stay in company. It is better not to draw it.

Living alone and being isolated are not the same

In November 2025, the Censos Sénior operation run by Portugal's national guard identified 43,074 older people living alone, isolated or in a vulnerable situation. Its criterion is not living alone: it includes people who live with someone and are isolated anyway, through distance, lack of transport, family living far away, or because the person they live with has limitations of their own.

The distinction has consequences. An 84-year-old living with an 87-year-old spouse, both with reduced mobility, in a village with no public transport, counts as "living alone" in no statistic at all. And they may go weeks without speaking to anyone outside the house.

Conversely, a 70-year-old living alone in a city centre, with children in the same city and a social life of their own, counts towards the number, and is no cause for concern.

Why this matters to whoever is planning

A municipality sizing its social response by the number of older people living alone is using an indicator that, in Portugal, understates the problem. It leaves out precisely the inland cases, where family exists but is ageing together with no support around it.

Census data is good for knowing where the older population is, and we have published that breakdown municipality by municipality ourselves. It is not good for knowing who is isolated, because that is not what it measures.

What separates the two is current knowledge, and that does not come from a census every five years. It comes from regular contact.

What is worth measuring

Three simple questions are worth more than the share of single-person households. How often does this person speak to someone outside the home? When did someone last see them? What has changed since then?

None of these is answered by census data, and all of them are answered by regular contact. That is what MILAE does, and it is why we do not work from lists of people who live alone, but from the population the social care team decides to follow, whether they live alone or not.