Indicator 1.31 Severe material and social deprivation rate by age group and sex

The ‘Income and Living Conditions’ (EU-SILC) domain covers the following topics: persons at risk of poverty or social exclusion, income inequality, income distribution and monetary poverty, living conditions and material deprivation. It also covers EU-SILC ad hoc modules, which are organised into collections of indicators on specific topics. The EU-SILC collection is a key instrument for providing the information required by the European Semester ([1]) and the European Pillar of Social Rights. It is also the main source of data for microsimulation purposes and for producing flash estimates of income distribution and poverty rates. In 2024, in addition to annual data, EU-SILC collected the three-yearly module on children health, access to healthcare and children specific deprivation, and the six-yearly module on access to services. The information collected in EU-SILC pertains to the following types of statistical units: private households and persons living in those households. Annex II to EU regulation 2019/2242 defines the specific statistical units for each variable, while Annex IV to the same Regulation specifies the content of the quality reports on the organisation of a sample survey in the income and living conditions domain, pursuant to EU regulation 2019/1700 of the European Parliament and of the Council.

The EU-SILC common framework aims to ensure standardisation at different levels. Conceptual standardisation is achieved by defining and documenting the common concepts/definitions underlying each measure/variable, the scope and the time reference. In 2021, new legislation on implementing EU-SILC came into force, revising and improving the survey (see Section 3.4). The new legislation provided for multiple changes to EU-SILC data collection, in particular: • it enforced the need for the following improvements: improved timeliness, with shorter deadlines for EU-SILC data submission; • it reformulated precision requirements at national and regional level (NUTS2) for the at-risk-of-poverty-or social-exclusion indicator and the persistent-risk-of-poverty rate; • additional/changed EU-SILC variables; • data collection with three frequencies: nucleus, three-year module and six-year module, and the recommendation to extend the longitudinal panel.

The target population is private households and all persons composing these households having their usual residence in the national territory. A private household means a person living alone or a group of persons who live together, providing for themselves the essentials of living. The reference period is the survey year. For all countries, the reference period for income variables in EU-SILC is the previous calendar year. The concept of accuracy refers to the precision of estimates computed from a sample rather than from the entire population. Accuracy depends on sample size, sampling design effects and the structure of the population being studied. In addition, sampling errors and non-sampling errors need to be considered. Sampling error means the variability that occurs at random due to using a sample rather than a census, and non-sampling errors are errors that occur in all phases of the data collection and production process. From 2021 EU regulation 2019/1700 lays down the requirements relating to geographical coverage, detailed sample characteristics, including subsampling, in accordance with Annex III to that Regulation, sampling characteristics, common data gathering periods, common standards for editing and imputation, weighting, estimation and variance estimation.

The long-term objective for this indicator is a value of 0