10 EU Countries with the Highest Meal-Unaffordability Rates, 2025
Key Findings
🏆
Romania leads in population unable to afford meat, chicken, fish or vegetarian equivalent every second day (%) with 18.10 in 2025.
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Average population unable to afford meat, chicken, fish or vegetarian equivalent every second day (%) in 2025: 12.80 · median: 12.15.
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Gap in 2025: Romania is 2× larger than Lithuania.
About This Dataset
10 EU Countries with the Highest Meal-Unaffordability Rates, 2025
Romania has the highest 2025 share of people unable to afford a meal containing meat, chicken, fish or a vegetarian equivalent every second day among the 27 EU countries: 18.1%. Eurostat ilc_mdes03 is filtered to all household compositions (TOTAL), all poverty statuses (TOTAL), annual frequency and percentage (PC). These are people living in private households, not a count of households or only people below the poverty threshold. The ten highest national rates are shown; the EU population aggregate is 8.5% and is not ranked as a country. Lithuania's 8.9% is provisional. No tie occurs at the tenth-place cutoff. The measure concerns financial inability to afford the specified meal frequency. It does not measure meat consumption, vegetarian preferences, nutritional adequacy, diagnosed malnutrition or the price of a festive dinner. The observation year is 2025, not 2026. Approaching winter and year-end food budgeting provide a plausible seasonal reason to examine household food resilience, not evidence of rising searches or a forecast of holiday hardship.
Analysis
Romania's 18.1% is 9.6 percentage points above the EU aggregate and about 2.13 times that benchmark. Exactly ten countries exceed 8.5%, so this top ten contains every country above the EU rate. The gap between Romania and tenth-ranked Lithuania is 9.2 points.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Eurostat - ilc_mdes03, 2025; updated October 20, 2026
- Coverage
- 10 entities · 2025 · 10 observations
- Measure
- population unable to afford meat, chicken, fish or vegetarian equivalent every second day (%)
- Last updated
- 31 October 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
How the figures are calculated
- Values use the measure and unit named on this page. Consult the dataset description and cited source for coverage, definitions and any unit conversions. Displayed values may be rounded for readability.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value in 2025.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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