Eurostat: 55% have spare rooms, but the data is misleading

55% have spare rooms: Eurostat measures housing wrong

Fifty-five percent of the population has excess rooms. The figure, attributed to Eurostat and covered by eldiario.es, sounds like a sarracena judgment but uses the wrong tape measure: it counts rooms, not square meters. In a country where much of the housing stock was built before 1990 for couples with two children, counting rooms is a quick way to assign blame to those with none.

The underlying thesis is not new: we live in houses that are too large, with space in surplus while affordable housing is scarce. The problem is that the overcrowding indicator—rooms versus residents—does not distinguish a well-distributed 90-square-meter apartment from a 60-square-meter basement with three partitions. The experts cited admit this: surface area is what matters.

What Eurostat measures and why room numbers are misleading

There is a fundamental confusion. A room is not equivalent to a bedroom: it can be a living room, an office, or a place where a grandchild sleeps two weekends a month. The disputed percentage is built on this ambiguity.

A common criterion suggests a 'good' house has one more room than residents, and a 'normal' one has as many rooms as residents. Under this measure, a widow who had four children and keeps five rooms is not hoarding space. A family of five selling a four-room apartment to buy a five-room one is not correcting an excess: they are balancing space with their life. Finding a six-room apartment is reportedly difficult.

Selling a large apartment to buy a small one is expensive

Here lies the knot the data misses. Recommending that a homeowner move to a smaller place clashes with a tax bill that rarely compensates. When selling, the government keeps up to 27% of the capital gain, calculated on the nominal value without deflating the original purchase cost. On top of that are municipal capital gains, notary, and registration fees. When buying the smaller property, another 11-12% between property transfer tax or VAT and legal documents.

As for those over 65, the debate notes they are exempt from income tax on capital gains without needing to reinvest, but they still pay municipal taxes and fees, and moving to a smaller apartment rarely leaves them with extra money. A full calculation shows the operation breaks even or results in losses. The nostalgia for one's own home and moving costs do the rest.

The housing stock ages and households get smaller

The picture is not static. The generation that bought large apartments for large families still lives in them while their children move out and buy their own. The arithmetic result is more rooms per capita without anyone accumulating anything: only time has passed.

Adjusting this picture clashes again with the cost of the operation. If moving from a large to a small apartment is taxed, housing stays put and the stock does not rotate. Rebuilding by demolishing and constructing is expensive and slow; distributing existing stock is impossible without touching everyone's property.

Multiple owners, land, and new construction: causes the indicator ignores

The easy correlation—more rooms per person, less housing available—breaks when looking at the market. Some point to multiple property owners who accumulate apartments as an investment, not a residence. Others point to municipalities that do not release land and a construction pace that does not cover demand. A part of the stock simply does not move: it is inherited or kept empty.

None of these pieces appear in the 55%. Nor does the contradiction in the original piece, which admits that before 'people could buy houses that are now palaces, but were normal back then.' Asserting that meters are in surplus while building was better with less money requires considerable argumentative flexibility.

The room tax and the drift of the debate

From diagnosis to remedy. One participant proposes a property tax that taxes square meters per registered resident, crossing data from the Cadastre and census: the administration already has your house plans and knows how many people live there. The response is that private property is a right of exclusion, to decide when it is used and not to cede space while being watched. There is even talk of room shaming, the shame of having a spare room.

Part of the debate also drifts toward immigration as the cause. It is a diversion without legal basis: there is no figure requiring room sharing, nor does it appear in any official project cited. The frustration is real; the blamed culprit is not. The tone of the conversation—from anger to irony and suspicion—says more about accumulated frustration than the figures.

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With these elements, it is predictable that the percentage will continue to be used as a rhetorical weapon: to tax, to blame, or to justify what is not built. Perhaps one day the indicator will be refined to measure surface area instead of doors. Meanwhile, it will not move a single partition. The problem was never about how many rooms we have, but how much the square meter surrounding them costs.