Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union

F4: Income and living conditions; Quality of life

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Annual data on Household Final Consumption Expenditure broken down by COICOP categories and by certain cross-sectional variables.

The main purpose of this survey at national level is to update the weights of the basket of goods and services used for the calculation of the HICP (Harmonised Indices of Consumer Prices). However it may also be used for many other purposes either at national or European level: economic studies, social analyses, market research…

Presented data are: mean consumption expenditure of private households; structure of mean consumption expenditure and household characteristics.

Household final consumption expenditure is measured in national currency, Euro and PPS (Purchasing Power Standard).

Household budget survey (HBS) data are collected via the National HBS surveys in each participating country. Data collection involves a combination of one or more interviews and diaries maintained by households and/or individuals, generally on a daily basis.  Following the adoption of innovative solutions for the data collection, it will be possible to collect some information directly through the use of apps, electronic diaries or special cards so the respondents' burden will be lowered. 

Data collection is approximately every 5 years: 1988, 1994, 1999, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020.  Next reference year is 2026.

The Cyprus, France and Malta Household Budget Survey Data for the year 2020, have been produced by converting the Cyprus, France and Malta Household Budget Survey Data for the year 2015 to 2020 Reference Year prices using the 2020 HICP coefficient.

The following table presents the most important nomenclatures and classifications for HBS 2020 wave:

Detailed information about all these nomenclatures may be found in RAMON, the Eurostat’s classification server at the URL:

 https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/eurostat 

The HBS collects information on Consumption Expenditure according to the Classification of Individual Consumption by Purpose COICOP. ECOICOP-2013 main divisions include: 

1. CP01              Food and non-alcoholic beverages
2. CP02              Alcoholic beverages, tobacco and narcotics
3. CP03              Clothing and footwear
4. CP04              Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels
5. CP05              Furnishings, household equipment and routine maintenance of the house
6. CP06              Health
7. CP07              Transport
8. CP08              Communications
9. CP09              Recreation and culture
10. CP10              Education
11. CP11              Restaurants and hotels
12. CP12              Miscellaneous goods and services

Household Final Consumption Expenditure

Final Consumption Expenditure per household and per adult equivalent as an average for the whole population and broken down by several cross-sectional variables.

The definition of the household for the purpose of the HBS is based on the two following criteria: co-residence and sharing of expenditures.

The following persons, if they share household expenses, are regarded as household members:

1. Persons usually resident, related to other members

2. Persons usually resident, not related to other members

3. Resident boarders, lodgers, tenants

4. Visitors

5. Live-in domestic servants, au-pairs

6. Persons usually resident, but temporarily absent from dwelling (for reasons of holiday travel, work, education or similar)

7. Children of the household who are being educated away from home

8. Persons absent for long periods, but having household ties: persons working away from home

9. Persons temporarily absent but having household ties: persons in hospital, nursing home, boarding school or other institution.

 Reference person is the adult (16+) with the highest income (also designated as "main income earner").

Households and household members

Individual private households. Institutional households and persons living in collective households or in institutions are generally excluded.

European Union and neighbouring countries.

Aggregates: European Union, Euro Area, EEA and EFTA.

List of participating Countries in HBS over time for which data are disseminated by Eurostat.

* Germany (until 1990 former territory of the FRG)

One complete year per round: 1988, 1994, 1999, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. Next reference year is 2026.

Not applicable.

A summary of the Units used by Table Type is given in the Table below:

One complete year per round: 1988, 1994, 1999, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. Next reference year is 2026.

The HBS data collection is run under a Gentlemen's agreement. This agreement was reached in the Statistical Programme Committee during its meeting of 1989.

The Household Budget Survey is included in Commission Regulation (EC) No 831/2002 implementing Council Regulation (EC) No 322/97 on Community Statistics, concerning access to confidential data for scientific purposes.

 Universities and certified research centres can apply for access to HBS microdata for scientific purposes.

Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 on European statistics (recital 24 and Article 20(4)) of 11 March 2009 (OJ L 87, p. 164), stipulates the need to establish common principles and guidelines ensuring the confidentiality of data used for the production of European statistics and the access to those confidential data with due account for technical developments and the requirements of users in a democratic society.

Data Processing

The datasets are sent by participating countries through a secure network (eDamis).  These are kept on servers in a secure environment.  Only a very limited number of persons have access to this data.  Apart from these few, access is given under strict established procedures and only in a secure room.  The computers in this room do not have any form of output but the monitor.  Results are saved on the server and forwarded by one of the persons who have access. 

No release calendar

Not applicable

In line with the Commission Regulation (EU) No 557/2013 of 17 June 2013 and the European Statistics Code of Practice Eurostat disseminates European statistics on Eurostat's website (see item 15 - 'Accessibility and clarity') respecting professional independence and in an objective, professional and transparent manner in which all users are treated equitably. The detailed arrangements are governed by the Eurostat protocol on impartial access to Eurostat data for users.

Every 5 years approximately: 1988, 1994 1999, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. Next reference year is 2026.

News articles on-line

Diverse publications (Statistics Explained, Pocket Books) have used partially or totally information from the HBS.

Data are accessible online through EUROSTAT  website under "Population and Social Conditions" or at: Database - Household budget surveys - Eurostat (europa.eu)

The Household Budget Survey is included in Commission Regulation (EC) No 831/2002 implementing Council Regulation (EC) No 322/97 on Community Statistics, concerning access to confidential data for scientific purposes.

Universities and certified research centres can apply for access to HBS microdata for scientific purposes. An algorithm has been used in a Computer Application, to anonymise HBS data.

Internet address: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat

There are three sources on EUROSTAT's website giving a slightly different perspective on Consumption Expenditure.  These are the National Accounts, the weights of the HICP and the HBS.

Metadata at table level.

'Household Budget Surveys in the EU. Methodology and recommendations for harmonisation. 2003' for the data of the Member States in the reference year 1999

Description of the data transmission for HBS (2010)

Description of the data transmission for HBS (2015)

Description of the data transmission for HBS (2020)

Participating Countries are encouraged to produce a quality report with each release.  Beside this EUROSTAT publishes an aggregated EU Quality Report for the particular collection.

This report takes into consideration different dimensions of Quality, which include:

• The user
• Timeliness and Punctuality
• Accuracy
• Comparability
• Coherence
• Cost and Burden

For more information please refer to the "EU Quality report of the ‘Household Budget Surveys’ ".

The HBS is not covered by a regulation and is run under a gentlemen's agreement.  Throughout the years, efforts towards harmonisation and quality assurance have been made. HBS is run by National Statistical Institutes which strive for complying to international standards.

Output standardisation is achieved by defining the format (list and content of target variables, data format) and the timetable of data transmission. This is complemented by Eurostat consistency and integrity checks applied to the micro-data. On receiving the micro-data files, EUROSTAT does run a validation procedure to check for any inconsistences or missing data and an explanation from the country is sought if needed.

The main goal of the HBS is to provide countries with the weights for their CPI.  Beside this, in many of the countries' quality reports, one finds that the country's HBS is also used by other secondary users, like Universities, market and social analysts, the media, NGOs and other organisations.

For the tables and information disseminated at EU level, the main users are other Commission Directorates General (DGs), Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), the European Central Bank (ECB), other international organisations like the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), market and social analysts and the media.  Neither Eurostat's Harmonised Consumer Price Index (HICP) unit nor the National Accounts (NA) unit make use of this source.  These usually get their data directly from the countries themselves, after these have adjusted them to take into consideration other sources of information.

HBS are used by Eurostat for modelling the joint distribution of income, consumption and wealth data, which is disseminated as part of experimental statistics.

Generally users have been satisfied with overall quality of the service delivered by Eurostat, which encompasses data quality and the supporting service provided to them but no particular information is gathered from them.

The HBS collects information on Consumption Expenditure according to the Classification of Individual Consumption  by Purpose (COICOP) .  The main divisions of ECOICOP-2013 include:

1. CP01              Food and non-alcoholic beverages
2. CP02              Alcoholic beverages, tobacco and narcotics
3. CP03              Clothing and footwear
4. CP04              Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels
5. CP05              Furnishings, household equipment and routine maintenance of the house
6. CP06              Health
7. CP07              Transport
8. CP08              Communications
9. CP09              Recreation and culture
10. CP10              Education
11. CP11              Restaurants and hotels
12. CP12              Miscellaneous goods and services

Expenditure on  Life Insurance and  Financial intermediation services indirectly measured (FISIM)  is not collected. Information on consumption expenditure on COICOP linked to activities that might be considered as less acceptable by the society (e.g. consumption of alcoholic beverages, narcotics or prostitution) are normally under-reported by the surveyed households, and hence these figures may not be fully reliable. This would reduce the total expenditure and also positively skew the other expenditures in the expenditure structure.

Like any sample survey, the statistics generated from the HBS data may be liable to errors which are inherent in the survey method used.  All the HBSs are sample surveys of private households.  Most of the participating countries drew a sample of households in a way that the probability of a household being selected is known (technically known as a probability design).  In this way, the results can be reliably projected from the sample to the household reference population with known levels of certainty/precision.

The HBS data were weighted. Sample weights are needed to correct for imperfections in the sample that might lead to bias and also to rectify other departures between the sample and the reference population.

Another issue which one has to contend with in such surveys is total non-response because some households, which are initially chosen, do not take part in the survey. In order to reduce the impact of this issue, the household design weights are inflated by applying correction factors which actually represent the inverse of the household response probabilities.

Total non-response could be partly avoided through the use of innovative tools such as electronic diaries, apps, special cards, as these will be able to automatically send a reminder to respondents if no feedback has been received.

Finally, most of the HBS countries also “calibrate” the design weights, corrected for non-response, to external data sources: this weight adjustment brings the sample estimates into agreement with known population characteristics (e.g. population totals by age group, gender, NUTS2 region etc) to increase accuracy.

For more information please refer to the: "EU Quality report of the ‘Household Budget Surveys’ 2010" and "EU Quality report of the ‘Household Budget Surveys’ 2015".

The HBS sample sizes range between 2 000 to 52 000 households. Obviously, the level of sampling errors directly depends on the achieved sample size: the higher the sample size, the better the accuracy.

From a Policy Making perspective, the figures which were produced should be satisfactory.

For more information please refer to the: "EU Quality report of the ‘Household Budget Surveys’ 2010" and "EU Quality report of the ‘Household Budget Surveys’ 2015".

The non-sampling errors in HBS can be summarised as follow:

1) Sampling frame and coverage errors
2) Non-response and substitutions
3) Measurement and processing errors

For more information please refer to the "EU Quality report of the ‘Household Budget Surveys’ 2010" and "EU Quality report of the ‘Household Budget Surveys’ 2015".

HBS indicators are published from 7 months until 4 years after the end of the HBS reference period. This time period has decreased with each HBS wave. 

In the previous HBS Quality Reports, a suggestion was made to shorten the period from the survey reference year to the date of publication of the HBS data.  The HBS 2015 data tables for most of countries were disseminated on Eurostat's website during May 2018. The HBS 2020 data tables for first countries were disseminated on Eurostat's website during July 2022.

Given that the HBS is voluntary and no legal basis exists at EU level, the survey structure and implementation arrangements are diverse; this has evident implications for comparability.  However, since the first HBS round (1988), all the participating countries and Eurostat have made great efforts to harmonize their HBS and to improve data comparability. Even so, there is still some room for improvement.

The main objective of the HBS is to exploit cross-sectional data on household consumption. This means that  the data between waves is not fully comparable.

In the case of the HBS, the most relevant sources for external comparison include the Weights used in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), Labour Force Surveys (LFS), National Accounts (NA) and various administrative and other sources, depending on the country.  Considering that these are totally different instruments, with different methodologies, sources and even sometimes definitions, overall coherence is acceptable

Normally there is very good internal coherence, however some countries collect expenditures at detailed levels and also of other items which may not be included in the COICOP lowest level, but could be included in a more aggregated level.  Because of this, some higher levels of consumption aggregates might be slightly higher than the sum of the corresponding lower levels. 

The HBS is one of the most demanding surveys that National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) carry out. Even more, the burden is especially felt by the households in the diary keeping phase, which for some countries may be a whole month.

The introduction of innovative tools as e.g. electronic diaries, apps and special cards aims at lowering the costs and burden for both respondents and NSIs.

The general Eurostat revision policy applies to this domain.

All reported errors (once validated) result in corrections of the disseminated data.

Reported errors are corrected in the disseminated data as soon as the correct data have been validated.

Data may be published even if they are missing for certain countries or flagged as provisional or of low reliability for some of them. They are replaced with final data once transmitted and validated. European aggregates are updated accordingly.

Whenever new data are provided and validated, the already disseminated data are updated. There is no specific updating schedule for incorporating ‘spontaneously’ provided new data.

National HBS surveys in each participating country

Eurostat has till now collected and published data for individual countries, and European aggregates every five years. However, about one third of the countries carry out annual surveys, another third have five-year interval between surveys, and in the rest of the countries the periodicity varies.

HBS data are collected via the National HBS surveys in each participating country, which include the EU countries and some non-EU countries. 

Data collection involves a combination of one or more interviews and diaries maintained by households and/or individuals, generally on a daily basis.

For the interview, there are four different ways to collect the data: Paper-Assisted Personal Interview (PAPI), Computer-Assisted Personal Interview (CAPI) which is the most used, Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI), Self-administrated questionnaire (CAWI). All collected data are confidential.

NSIs transmit data to Eurostat via secure web platform eDamis, in various formats: SAS datasets, CSV files, TSV files or Excel files. 

Basic validation checks are first performed to see to what extent the set of variables transmitted and the codes used, are in line with the lists in the Transmission Document  approved by the working group. Then, more detailed statistics are produced for variables of interest, e.g. for Income and Consumption Expenditure. Finally, comparisons are made of the balance of Income versus Consumption expenditure.

The Member States supply micro-data files (with records for individual households and household members) which are harmonised, standardised, aggregated and tabulated by Eurostat, or aggregated tables in the case of a few Member States (NL, NO for 2010).

The aggregates for the EU, the Euro-zone and EFTA/EEA are calculated by Eurostat in the following way:

All figures on household consumption expenditure, including the breakdowns, are computed using the household population size of each country as a weight.

All figures on structure of consumption expenditure, including the breakdowns, are computed using the total household final consumption expenditure of each country as a weight.

Adjustments for the difference between the survey and the reference periods using consumer price indexes.

Adjustments for purchasing power parities (average index for the whole household final consumption expenditure).

There is no legal basis, hence each country has its own targets, methodology and survey programming. Data supplied by each country are not perfectly harmonised. After each round, some harmonisation efforts have been carried out and each new round of data collection is better harmonised than the previous one. However, some problems of comparability among countries still remain. Generally speaking, more recent data are better harmonised than old data and data from the Member States are better harmonised than data from the Candidate Countries.

The most important methodological difference in quantitative terms, but not the only one, is the owner-occupier imputed rent. In 2015 the following countries have not imputed any rent for the use of owner-occupied dwellings as household main residence: Czechia, Malta, United Kingdom and North Macedonia. In 2020 the following countries have not imputed any rent for the use of owner-occupied dwellings as household main residence: Czechia and Malta.

In order to assess the impact of these problems of comparability on data analyses, we recommend consulting Eurostat publications listed in the Annexes section below.

In general, comparability between any two different rounds may be problematic, because of the numerous methodological changes introduced by most countries over the time. Major improvement is envisaged for 2026 wave, which will be conducted under new EU legislation.