In 2019, 17.3% of the EU population reported that they suffered from noise coming from their neighbours or from the street.
Unsurprisingly, this proportion is more than twice as high for people living in cities (24.1%) than for those in rural areas (10.4%).
The proportion of people that reported having experienced problems with neighbourhood noise tended to decrease as the number of persons in the household increased. While almost 20.8% of single persons claimed to have been disturbed by this type of noise, noise affected 17.8% of two-adult households and only 15.5% of those households made up of three or more adults. Similarly, more households without dependent children (18.2%) reported being affected than those with dependent children (16.4%).
The proportion of people being affected by noise is higher for single persons aged below 65 (25.2%) than for those above 65 years old (14.9%).
1 in 4 suffers from neighbourhood noise in Malta, the Netherlands and Germany
Across the EU Member States in 2019, over a quarter of the population reported experiencing problems with noise from their neighbours or the street in Malta (28.3%), the Netherlands (26.6%) and Germany (26.1%) Next in the rankings were those living in Portugal (22.7%), Luxembourg (20.2%) and Denmark (20.1%). At the opposite end of the scale, the lowest proportions were recorded in Croatia, Estonia and Ireland (all 8.2%), ahead of Bulgaria (8.9%), Hungary (9.7%) and Slovakia (10.5%).
The source dataset can be found ilc_mddw01.
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