Across the European Union, 42 million working people cannot afford a single week away from home. As tourism breaks records, the workers powering the economy are being left behind.
A record season with an asterisk
Summer 2025 is shaping up to be another landmark year for European tourism. The EU registered 3.08 billion overnight stays in tourist accommodation in 2025 — a new all-time record, up 2.2% from the previous year. Yet buried beneath that headline is a more uncomfortable truth: one in seven working Europeans cannot afford to be part of it.
According to Eurostat, approximately 42 million employed people in the EU — 15% of the working population — are unable to afford a one-week annual holiday away from home. That number has risen for three consecutive years. The tourism boom and the holiday poverty crisis are not contradictions — they are happening simultaneously.
Not just a poverty problem
The most striking aspect of these figures is who they affect. Holiday poverty is no longer confined to the unemployed or the economically inactive. It has become a working-class phenomenon. Across Europe’s four largest economies alone — Germany, France, Spain and Italy — tens of millions of employed people cannot take a basic break, with Italy (36%) and Spain (32%) sitting well above the EU average of 28%.
For many workers, the issue is not unemployment but underemployment, precarious contracts, and the rising cost of travel and accommodation outpacing wage growth. Having a job, in other words, is no longer a guarantee of being able to rest.
Two Europes in One Union
The data exposes a geography of inequality that maps almost perfectly onto the EU’s economic fault lines. In Romania, 61% of the population cannot afford a one-week holiday — more than half the country. In Luxembourg, that figure is just 11%. The gap between these two EU member states is 50 percentage points. They share a union, a currency framework, and a single market — but not the same reality.
Eastern and Southern Europe bear the heaviest burden: Bulgaria (39%), Hungary (39%), Portugal (33%) and Croatia (33%) all sit significantly above the EU average. Meanwhile, the Nordic countries — Sweden (12%), Finland (15%), Denmark (14%) — cluster at the opposite end of the spectrum, reflecting stronger social safety nets and higher baseline wages.
| Year | Türkiye (%) | EU Average (%) |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 68.7 | 37.6 |
| 2016 | 65.2 | 34.8 |
| 2018 | 62.1 | 32.1 |
| 2020 | 60.8 | 30.4 |
| 2022 | 59.3 | 28.9 |
| 2023 | 58.6 | 28.5 |
| 2024 | 57.4 | 27.0 |
The workers left out of the boom
The paradox at the heart of these numbers is hard to ignore. Europe’s tourism industry is growing, attracting record numbers of international visitors and generating hundreds of billions in revenue. Yet the people who work in hotels, restaurants, transport, and retail — many of them in the very destinations tourists flock to — are among those least likely to take a holiday themselves.
This is not a marginal issue. Forty-two million workers represent a structural failure, not an anomaly. And with the figure rising for the third year in a row, the trend is moving in the wrong direction.
Beyond Europe’s borders
The picture looks even starker when candidate countries are included. In Türkiye, 57.4% of the population aged 16 and over cannot afford a one-week holiday — more than double the EU average, and second only to Romania on the broader European scale. The data serves as a reminder that the inequalities visible within the EU do not stop at its borders.
| Country | Rate (%) |
|---|---|
| Türkiye | 57.4 |
| Romania | 61 |
| Greece | 47 |
| Italy | 36 |
| Spain | 32 |
| EU Average | 27 |
| France | 23 |
| Germany | 21 |
| Netherlands | 13 |
| Luxembourg | 11 |
What the numbers don’t capture
Behind every percentage point is a family that didn’t travel, a child who didn’t see the sea, a worker who spent their summer at home not by choice. Eurostat measures affordability — it does not measure the exhaustion, the stress, or the quiet resignation that comes with knowing a basic rest is out of reach.
The EU has no binding framework specifically targeting holiday poverty. Policy discussions remain fragmented. As long as that remains the case, the record-breaking tourism headlines will continue to mask a reality that millions of Europeans live every summer.
Source: Eurostat, 2024–2025 data. Country figures refer to 2025; comparative worker data refer to Eurostat’s most recent 2024 release.