Technical article

Winter Without Central Heating: What the Official Numbers Say

How cold do the winters get inside the home?

By Neil Solomon · 5 min read

Picture a couple named Dan and Helen. Both are 64. They are drawn to the Mediterranean because it is warm, and they have noticed that many listings never mention heating. They want to know one thing. How cold do the winters get inside the home?

Nobody publishes a figure for that exact question. Two official measures come close. One counts how many people say they cannot keep their home warm enough. The other counts how much heating a place needs over a year. Both come from Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union.

How many people cannot keep their home warm

Eurostat reports this for 2024. Its words: "9.2% of the EU population was not able to keep their home adequately warm." The page is dated 2 February 2026.

Eurostat's lowest figures were Finland at 2.7%, Poland and Slovenia at 3.3%, and Estonia and Luxembourg at 3.6%. Cyprus and Malta did not appear in either list. Their figures, and the 2023 figures in the table, come from the Eurostat database table on inability to keep the home adequately warm (updated 17 September 2026). Eurostat's housing page rounds Spain to 18%. That is the same data, rounded.

Notice what this measure is. It is what households report, and it includes people who cannot pay the bill. It does not tell us whether a home has central heating. A later section gives that.

How much heating a place needs

Eurostat also counts "heating degree days". In my words, it is a yearly total that rises with every cold day and every degree below a comfortable level. A higher number means more heating is needed.

The two Eurostat pages give different 2022 figures for Malta and Cyprus, and I show both without picking. Malta and Cyprus had the two lowest figures in the EU in 2022 on the earlier page. Over the longer period Malta averages 534. For Cyprus, one Eurostat page gives 778 and an earlier one gives 780. They cover different spans of years, so both are shown. By my arithmetic, the Bulgarian region needs about five times the heating of Malta's long-term average (2,767 divided by 534).

The database gives national figures for Spain and Bulgaria. Spain needed about half the heating of Bulgaria in 2024 (1,497 against 2,175, my arithmetic). Spain's regions vary widely. Spain ranges from 18 on Fuerteventura, the lowest of any EU area of its size, up to colder inland places that are not among the sources.

What heating people actually have

Eurostat's survey of living conditions (dataset ilc_lvhe01, updated 24 April 2026, year 2023) gives the share of people who live in a home with each kind of heating. It counts people, not buildings. The shares add up to 100%, with a small "unknown".

My arithmetic: adding "no fixed heating" and "no heating", 55.1% of people in Malta, 35.5% in Cyprus and 31.0% in Spain live in a home without a fixed heating system, against 6.5% for the EU and 2.6% for Bulgaria. "Individual heating" is a fixed system for one home, such as a gas boiler or a stove. In Spain, central heating reaches about one person in ten. The figures say nothing about how warm those homes are, which is the first table's question.

What is left open

• Any figure from a national government page. The figures here are all from Eurostat, which compiles them from the national surveys.
• Whether the "no fixed heating" group uses portable heaters, air conditioners that heat, or nothing. The table does not say.