17.9% of the population of the European Union (EU) reported suffering from noise from neighbours or the street in 2016. Unsurprisingly, this proportion is more than twice as high for people living in cities (23.3%) than for those in rural areas (10.4%).
Moreover, the proportion of people that reported having experienced problems with noise from their neighbours or the street tends to decrease with the number of persons in the household. While almost 20.8% of single persons claimed to have been disturbed by neighbourhood noise, this affected 17.8% of two-adult households and 16.6% of those made up of three or more adults. Similarly, the share is higher for households without dependent children (18.4%) than for those with dependent children (17.5%).
1 in 4 persons suffer from neighbourhood noise in Malta, Germany and the Netherlands
Across the EU Member States in 2016, about a quarter of the population reported experiencing problems with noise from their neighbours or the street in Malta (26.2%), Germany (25.1%) and the Netherlands (24.9%). They were followed by those living in Portugal (23.1%), Romania (20.3%), Greece (19.9%) and Luxembourg (19.7%).
At the opposite end of the scale, the lowest proportion was recorded in Ireland (7.9%), ahead of Croatia (8.5%), Bulgaria (10.0%) and Estonia (10.4%).
The source dataset can be found here.