Most Bulgarians Have Their Own Home - Eurostat

About 85% of Bulgarians own their own home, which is one of the highest indicators in the European Union, according to Eurostat data on housing conditions in the 28 EU countries as of 2014.

The average size of housing in Bulgaria is around 72 sq.m and 96 sq.m. in the EU.

Romania gets the first position for number of people with their private housing (96% of the population), followed by Croatia and Lithuania with 90%.

In 2014, 39.7% of the EU-member states lived in flats and 59.6% in houses. In Bulgaria, more than half of the population live in brick houses, and nearly 45% - in apartments.

In 2014, 11. 4% of the EU population lived in households that spent more that 40% of their disposable income on housing. In Greece, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and Romania the housing cost overburden rate exceeded 14.0%. Bulgaria is after them with 13%, while the lowest rates were reported by Cyprus (4%) and Malta (1.6%).

One major element of the quality of housing conditions is the availability of sufficient space in the dwelling. In 2014, while the EU-28 average rate of overcrowding was 16.9 % the highest rates of overcrowding were observed in Romania (52.3 %), Poland (44.2 %) and Bulgaria (43.3 %). The lowest were in the Netherlands (3.5 %), Cyprus (2.2 %) and Belgium (2.0 %).

Eurostat also assesses countries by the lack of certain basic sanitary facilities in the dwelling (a bath or shower or indoor flushing toilet) and problems in the general condition of the dwelling (leaking roof or dwelling being too dark). In 2014, 79.4 % of Europeans  were declared as not deprived for the ‘housing dimension’, 15.8 % were found to suffer from one of the dwelling problems, 3.9 % suffered from two, 0.6 % suffered from three and 0.2 % suffered from all four dwelling problems (i.e. leaking roof/damp walls/floors/foundation or rot in window frames and accommodation being too dark and no bath/shower and no indoor flushing toilet for sole use of the household).
 
Exceptions to this EU trend were Bulgaria and Romania, where sanitary problems were found to be more frequent than the other two housing problems mentioned above. However, about 27 % of Bulgarians are afraid of burglary or a crime, or vandalism at their residence. Around 16% of the Bulgarians are not satisfied with the environmental around their home and problems with the public transport.

In 2012, 12.9 % of the EU-28 population declared that their dwelling was not comfortably warm during winter. The share of the population living in a dwelling not comfortably warm during winter did not exceed 30.0 % in any EU Member State, except for Portugal (46.6 %) and Bulgaria (41.1 %).

Moreover, in Malta, Portugal, Bulgaria, Spain, Greece, France and Cyprus, more than half of the severely deprived population found the heating system unable to keep their dwelling adequately warm during winter; while more than two thirds of the population in Greece, Bulgaria and Malta perceived that the dwelling was not kept efficiently cool during summer.

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