Spain is the European country where the emancipation rate has fallen the most since 2016. The proportion of young people between 18 and 34 years old who live independently and do not need financial support from their family has dropped from 41% to 31% in 2025, according to the report When moving forward is not enough. Spanish youth facing the challenge of emancipation, presented this Tuesday by Comisiones Obreras. That is ten points less in almost a decade, a setback that has widened the gap with the rest of the continent, where the rate has remained stable around 50%.
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The national situation contrasts with that of some of the main countries in the region. Germany has followed the opposite path and has strongly reduced ―by 10 points― the proportion of young people who depend economically on their family. France, although it has worsened, has done so much less than Spain. Its emancipation rate has fallen by about four points in the last decade, compared to Spain’s ten points. Italy and Greece also show levels similar to those of 2016, while Portugal has recorded a slight improvement.
The data show that currently, only three out of ten young people between 18 and 34 years old do not depend economically on their family. On the other hand, the percentage who live with their parents or receive money from them has increased from 58.9% to 68.7% in just 10 years. The deterioration occurs while other youth economic indicators have improved, which demonstrates, according to the union’s analysis, that “the prolonged decline in the emancipation rate originates in the growing tension in the housing market, which affects both buying and renting.”
For Pau Garcia Orrit, confederal secretary of Youth of CC OO, “what is preventing young people from having an autonomous life project is this runaway rental market and a real estate market that, if it has had political intervention, it has not been at the service of the working class.”
The report, which analyzes microdata from the Living Conditions Survey and other public statistical sources, highlights the drop in youth unemployment, the reduction of temporary contracts, and the recovery of wages. The unemployment rate among those under 30, which approached 40% in 2013, now hovers around 16%; and temporary employment has dropped from around 56% in 2018 to 32% in the first half of 2026. But these improvements have not been enough to facilitate financial autonomy among the population aged 18 to 34. “Even people to whom the good macroeconomic situation, labor reform, and their own skills have allowed good working conditions have difficulties emancipating,” the document notes.
Orrit, for her part, has recalled that 96% of young people’s salary has to go to paying rent and that around 70,000 euros in savings are needed to be able to buy a home in large cities, which explains the difficulty for the population to emancipate.
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Indeed, housing prices in the country have accumulated more than a decade of increases since the market bottomed out in 2014, after six years of adjustments following the burst of the early-century real estate bubble. The value of apartments for sale rose almost 10% in 2025, reaching a new high of 2,354 euros per square meter on average. The price was almost 30% above the maximum recorded in the third quarter of 2007, at the height of the real estate boom, although not accounting for inflation accumulated since then. The price increase extends to both new construction and used housing, and although the rise has occurred throughout the country, the highest prices are concentrated in large cities.
CC OO insists in its report that, with these prices, “homeownership is inaccessible for young people,” so the only option is the rental market. “And given the absence of a public rental housing stock, the only possibility is to turn to the private market, where prices have also not stopped rising.”
The union emphasizes that rent increases occur especially in new contracts, directly impacting young people and migrants, who do not have a previous lease relationship. Data from the Bank of Spain clearly show this difference. Between 2019 and 2024, the price of rents already in effect barely increased, with an average real growth (discounting inflation) of 0.4% per year, partly due to limits applied to contract updates, which generally prevent them from rising above the CPI evolution. In contrast, new rents have become much more expensive. After remaining practically stable between 2020 and 2022, their prices increased by 2.9% in real terms in 2023 and 4.6% in 2024. And offer data from portals suggest the increase remained around 5% in 2025.
The difficulty in emancipating especially affects those aged 25 to 29, a stage in which they have usually finished their education and begin to consolidate in the labor market, but it also extends to the 30 to 34 age group, which continues to show difficulties in starting an independent life. In this regard, the document points out that “for more than fifteen years, the percentage of emancipated young people has been falling among both men and women.”
Women, in any case, show a greater propensity to emancipate, although they often do so under more precarious conditions, the union notes.
