ArivitLiving alone and feeling lonely are not the same thing
Arivit Editorial Team · Published
No. Living alone and feeling lonely are two different things, and the statistics that exist for Spain measure them separately. In 2025, 22.8% of people aged 65 or over lived alone, according to Eurostat. That figure describes the make-up of the household: how many people live under one roof. It says nothing about how the person living there feels. Unwanted loneliness is a subjective state, it is studied with purpose-built surveys, and it appears in none of the series that count households. The closest official figures come to it is measuring contact with other people: in 2022, 4.5% of people aged 65 or over had not got together with relatives in the previous year, and 15.8% had not got together with friends, according to Eurostat. Three indicators, three different questions, and none of them is loneliness.
Two different questions
When an older person is said to be "alone", two ideas are being mixed that are worth keeping apart.
The first is objective and can be counted: how many people live in their household? If the answer is one, that person lives alone. It is the question the INE and Eurostat answer when they publish how many single-person households there are, or what share of older people live in one.
The second is subjective and cannot be counted in a register: does that person feel short of company, that the relationships they have are not the ones they would want? That is unwanted loneliness. It can only be known by asking the person, with surveys designed for it, which is why it does not appear in the household series.
One statistic counts doors; the other counts meetings. Neither counts what a person feels.
The two ideas overlap, but they do not coincide. There are people who live alone by choice, with a busy social life, and people who live with others and feel deeply lonely. Confusing the two questions leads to reading a household figure as if it were a figure of suffering, and it is not.
What living alone measures
The European indicator answers a very specific question: out of every 100 people aged 65 or over, how many live in a household made up of one person. In 2025 it was 22.8%, according to Eurostat. The series starts in 2004, when the figure was 23.4%, and in that time it has moved within a narrow band: its lowest value was 21.7% in 2011 and its highest 25.2% in 2018. The 2025 figure is below the 2004 one.
In numbers of households, the INE counted 2.13 million single-person households of people aged 65 or over in 2020, against 1.81 million in 2013. The latest available data in that series are for 2020, because the survey that produced it stopped being published that year.
The two figures describe the same reality from two angles, and they are explained in more detail in how many older people live alone in Spain. What matters here is what both leave out: everything that happens beyond the front door.
What contact with others does measure
Within the European survey on living conditions, Eurostat publishes an indicator that comes one step closer to people's experience: whether they got together with relatives and with friends in the year before the survey. It has been measured in two editions, 2015 and 2022.
In 2022, 4.5% of people aged 65 or over in Spain had not got together with relatives in the previous year, according to Eurostat. In 2015 that figure was 2.5%.
The share who had not got together with friends is larger: 15.8% in 2022, against 12.1% in 2015, according to Eurostat.
Both figures rose between the two editions. They deserve careful reading for two reasons. The first is that there are only two points, seven years apart, and two points do not draw a trend. The second is that the 2022 edition covers a period immediately after the pandemic restrictions, which may affect answers about getting together. The survey cannot say how much weight each explanation carries.
Source: Eurostat (2022)
| Period | Value |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 2.5 |
| 2022 | 4.5 |
Source: Eurostat (2022)
| Period | Value |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 12.1 |
| 2022 | 15.8 |
Why this is not loneliness either
Getting together with relatives and friends, or not, measures contact, not felt companionship. A person can see their family every week and feel lonely at those visits; another can meet few people and miss nobody. The Eurostat indicator counts meetings, and meetings are an ingredient of social life, not its outcome.
There is also a difference of population the reader should keep in mind. The contact indicators are calculated over all people aged 65 or over, whether they live alone or with others. None of the figures in this article says what share of those who live alone have gone a year without seeing their family, because that combination is not published. Crossing the 22.8% with the 4.5% would produce a number that exists in no source.
How loneliness is measured, then
Unwanted loneliness is studied with surveys that ask directly about the feeling: how often a person feels lonely, whether they have someone to talk to about their worries, whether their network of relationships is the one they would wish for. In Spain there are barometers and specific studies on the question, with their own methods, and their results are not comparable one to one with the household series or the contact indicators.
This article cites no figures from those studies because they come from opinion surveys with samples and questions different from official statistics, and mixing them with the series above in one text would invite exactly the comparison this article is trying to avoid.
What these figures do not say
None of the series above says who suffers. The 22.8% who live alone includes people who chose to and people who did not; the 4.5% who do not see their family includes those who have no family and those who do not want to see it; the 15.8% who do not see friends includes those who lost theirs and those who never had any nearby.
Nor do they say where each person lives in relation to others. Living alone in the same building as a daughter and living alone two hundred kilometres from any relative count exactly the same.
What they do allow is asking the right question. Faced with a figure of older people living alone, the question is not how many of them suffer, which the figure does not answer, but what we know about their contact with others and what we would need to ask them to know how they feel.
Frequently asked questions
Is living alone the same as feeling lonely?
No. Living alone describes the make-up of the household and is measured by counting people; feeling lonely is a subjective state that can only be known by asking the person. Official statistics measure the first.
How many older people live alone in Spain?
In 2025, 22.8% of people aged 65 or over lived alone, according to Eurostat. The INE counted 2.13 million single-person households of people of that age in 2020, the latest year with data.
How many older people do not see their family?
In 2022, 4.5% of people aged 65 or over had not got together with relatives in the previous year, and 15.8% had not got together with friends, according to Eurostat. In 2015 the figures were 2.5% and 12.1%.
Is there an official statistic on unwanted loneliness?
Unwanted loneliness is studied with specific surveys that ask about the feeling, not with the household series or the contact indicators. Their results are not directly comparable with the figures in this article.
Sources
This content was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the Arivit editorial team before publication. Our editorial standards