How many older women live alone in Spain

In 2025, 29.2% of women aged 65 or over lived alone in Spain, compared with 14.6% of men of the same age, according to Eurostat. The proportion of older women living alone is therefore double that of men. This is not a feature of one particular year: the gap appears, with fluctuations, in every year of the available series, which begins in 2004.

What this figure actually 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 a single person. It is published separately for women and for men, which makes a direct comparison possible.

It is worth being clear about what falls inside that definition and what falls outside it. Inside is the composition of the household, meaning how many people are registered as living in it. Outside is everything else: how often that person sees their family, how far away they live, whether they receive visitors or have support nearby. Someone who lives alone and has daily visitors and someone who lives alone and goes weeks without seeing anyone count exactly the same in this statistic.

Two figures and a gap

In 2025, the two figures were 29.2% for women and 14.6% for men, according to Eurostat.

Read separately, each describes a group. Read together they describe something different and more stable: the difference between them. Of everything these series contain, that difference is the most consistent feature.

A gap that appears in every year of the series

In every year recorded, from 2004 to 2025, the percentage of older women living alone has been higher than the percentage of men, according to Eurostat. There is not a single year in which the two figures meet, let alone reverse.

What does change is the size of that gap. In 2004, the figure for women was 30.3% and for men 13.9%. In 2018, women stood at 31.0% and men reached the highest value in their entire series, 17.8%. In 2025 the figures are 29.2% and 14.6%.

Neither series rises steadily

It is tempting to read these figures as a sustained upward trend. The series does not support that, and it is worth saying so plainly.

The percentage of older women living alone reached its maximum in 2022, at 31.9%, and has fallen every year since: 30.2% in 2023, 29.9% in 2024 and 29.2% in 2025, according to Eurostat. The 2025 figure is in fact lower than the 2004 one. Its lowest value is not at the start of the series but in 2011, at 28.1%.

The series for men does not describe a straight line either. It began at 13.9% in 2004, reached its minimum in 2011 at 13.3%, then rose to 17.8% in 2018, and in 2025 stands at 14.6%. It is above its starting point, but well below that peak.

One detail helps in reading both: the two series recorded their lowest value in the same year, 2011. They move with a degree of synchrony, then, though at very different levels.

The stretch when men came closer

Between 2014 and 2019 the figure for men held at high values for its own series: 15.7% in 2014, 17.3% in 2015 and 2016, 17.7% in 2017, 17.8% in 2018 and 17.2% in 2019, according to Eurostat. Across that stretch, the distance between women and men was the shortest of the whole period.

Afterwards the figure for men fell back: 15.8% in 2020, 15.3% in 2023 and 14.4% in 2024. Relative to its own level, the series for men travels a wider path than the series for women, which moves within a narrower band.

The year in which the two figures came closest was not the year of the male maximum but 2015, when women stood at 29.4% and men at 17.3%, according to Eurostat. This is worth pointing out because the maximum of one series and the point of closest approach between two series are different things, and they are easy to confuse when reading a chart.

These series describe that movement, but they do not explain it. Attributing it to a demographic change, to an effect of the age structure or to the methodology of the survey itself requires sources other than this one.

Why the overall figure sits in between

For people aged 65 or over as a whole, without separating by sex, the proportion living alone was 22.8% in 2025, according to Eurostat. That figure sits between the two above, and not by coincidence: it summarises both groups in a single number.

That average is useful for describing the scale of the phenomenon, and it is the one that appears when the question is how many older people live alone in Spain. It is less useful when the question is who lives alone, because an average conceals precisely the difference that stays most constant here.

What these figures do not tell us

The data above counts households, not experiences.

It does not indicate why a person lives alone, or whether that situation was chosen or came about through circumstance. It does not distinguish between someone living in the same building as their children and someone living hundreds of kilometres away. And above all it does not measure unwanted loneliness, which is a subjective state and is studied through specific surveys. Living alone and feeling lonely are different things, and these series describe only the first.

Nor do they explain the difference between women and men. The statistic measures it precisely; interpreting it, whether in terms of life expectancy, age differences within couples or differing life courses, requires other sources.

Frequently asked questions

How many older women live alone in Spain?

In 2025, 29.2% of women aged 65 or over lived alone, according to Eurostat.

Do more older women live alone than men?

Yes. In 2025 the figure for women was 29.2% and for men 14.6%, according to Eurostat. That difference appears in every year of the series, from 2004 onwards.

Is the number of older women living alone increasing?

Not in recent years. The percentage reached its maximum in 2022, at 31.9%, and has fallen every year since, to 29.2% in 2025, according to Eurostat.

Does this mean there is more loneliness among older women?

That is not what these data measure. The series records single person households, not feelings of loneliness, which are studied through specific surveys and a different methodology.

Sources

• Eurostat, people aged 65 or over living alone, by sex