Where in Europe do households save most of their income?

By Servet Yanatma Published on 26/05/2026 - 7:00 GMT+2 Share Comments Share Facebook Twitter Flipboard Send Reddit Linkedin Messenger Telegram VK Bluesky Threads Whatsapp

Net household saving rates vary widely across Europe, with Greece being the only country where households spend more than they earn. Experts point to precautionary reasons and retirement as the dominant saving motives.

People save for several reasons, helping them build wealth and prepare for unexpected expenses. A recent study revealed that almost two-thirds of Europeans save for precautionary reasons, while retirement is the dominant motive for half of them.

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So, in which European countries do people save the most? And how much of their disposable income do Europeans actually set aside?

Net household saving represents the portion of household income that is not spent on final consumption.

According to the OECD, net household saving rates vary widely across Europe. In 2024 or 2025, they range from -9.3% in Greece to 14.7% in Sweden and Hungary, compared with an EU average of 8.1%.

Greece: Where spending outpaces income

Greece is the only country in negative territory. That means households there spent more than their net disposable income, either drawing on accumulated savings or borrowing to finance their expenditure.

Alongside Hungary and Sweden, the net household saving rate exceeds 10% in Czechia (13.7%), France (12.8%), Germany (10.3%) and the Netherlands (10.2%).

Spain (9.2%) and Ireland (9%) also remain above the EU average.

UK and Italy: The major economies with the lowest saving rates

While France, Germany and Spain have higher saving rates than the EU average, the UK (4.7%) and Italy (3.2%) post comparatively lower figures.

In Latvia, the rate is zero — meaning households spend every penny of their income. Slovakia (2%), Estonia (3%), Portugal (3.4%) and Lithuania (3.8%) all sit below 4%.

Two Nordic countries also fall below the EU average: Denmark (7.5%) and Finland (4.4%).

Computing saving rates tricky

“Computing household saving rates is very tricky, and comparing across nations is even trickier,” Michael Haliassos, a professor at theGoethe University in Frankfurt, told Euronews Business.

He pointed out the difficulties in measuring both disposable income and household consumption.

Income is prone to misreporting or non-reporting, often due to fears over tax authorities or confidentiality concerns.

Consumption, meanwhile, is difficult to capture in surveys, as it is subject to recall problems, and the approaches to handling these measurement issues can differ across countries.

The case of Greece

Haliassos noted that Greece was registering the highest share of households with consumption above income in the EU at the depth of its sovereign debt crisis in 2015, and the second highest after Romania) even around 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic when consumption opportunities fell dramatically.

Greece's saving rate was mostly positive in the early 2000s, though it briefly dipped below zero a couple of times.

Things changed sharply from 2010, as the debt crisis pushed the rate deep into negative figures, hitting its lowest point at -16.5% in 2013. It never really recovered.

After edging back close to zero in 2021, Greece dropped again to -12.2% in 2022 and has stayed around -9% since.

The EU average remained broadly stable over the same period, with a sharp jump to 12.4% in 2020 as pandemic lockdowns left households with less to spend on.

Greece was one of the EU countriesin 2024 where the average level of adjusted gross disposable income of households per capita was more than 20.0% below the EU average according to Eurostat.

Michael Haliassos emphasized that there are no persistently high savers and low savers among the EU countries, but they are subject to the differential response of countries to various crises.

“Key determinants of the saving rate are the age composition of the population and the responsiveness of different household age and occupational groups to the ensuing crises,” he said.

Why do Europeans save? The role of social safety nets

Charles Yuji Horioka and Luigi Ventura found that the generosity of social safety nets seems to affect the importance of individual saving motives.

People tend to save less for retirement in countries with generous public pensions, and less for unexpected expenses in countries with strong public healthcare systems.

“These findings suggest that the retirement and precautionary motives are the dominant motives for saving in Europe partly because social safety nets are not fully adequate,” they said in their NBER paper published in 2025.

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