According to the latest figures from the European statistics office for 2025, young people in Croatia leave the parental home at an average age of 31.5. The European Union average is 26.3. That is a gap of over five years and last place in the entire Union. The previous year the figure was 31.3 - so it is not improving, it is quietly rising.

Behind Croatia come Greece and Slovakia at around 30.9, then Spain and Italy at 30.2. The southern and southeastern parts of Europe sit next to one another at the bottom of that list, which in itself says this is not about national character but about something those economies share.

The Finns leave a whole decade earlier

At the other end of the table stand the Finns, who strike out on their own around 21. After them come Denmark at 21.8, and Estonia and Lithuania at 22.7. The difference between Croatia and Finland is almost exactly ten years - an entire decade of life in the childhood bedroom.

European statistics also note that the Union-wide average has hovered around 26 for more than two decades. So the European average is holding still, while the bottom drifts away from it.

They work, and still live at home

The most important figure is not the age but what explains it. In 2025, 75.3 percent of young people aged 18 to 34 in Croatia lived with at least one parent. The Union average is 49.8 percent. And no, these are not all students and unemployed: Croatia is among the countries where more than half of young people living with their parents work full time.

That is the sentence that demolishes every comfortable explanatory tale about a spoiled generation. A person working full time who cannot afford a roof of their own does not have an ambition problem. They have a price problem.

The bill is in the housing

The European Commission's 2026 analysis points straight at it: limited supply for long-term rental, a shortage of social housing, and too little supply exactly where demand is highest. The Commission estimates Croatia is short of around 230,000 housing units - while at the same time a large number of existing flats stand empty or outside the long-term rental market.

Empty flats and people with nowhere to live, in the same country, at the same time. That is not a shortage of construction, it is a choice about how what has been built gets used.

Nobody has compiled a comparable figure for us, but the landscape is recognisable: a new-build bought by someone who will not live in it, rent eating a bigger share of the wage than it did five years ago, and a thirty-year-old still waking up in the room where they revised for their final exams. The question is not whether our figure would look better. The question is whether anyone is measuring it at all.