More People in the Netherlands Are Single or Living Alone, New Figures Show
At the start of 2025, 5.7 million adults in the Netherlands were single and 4.4 million lived alone, CBS says. 30% of adults now have no long-term partner, up from 27% in 2013.
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More people in the Netherlands are single, living alone, or in a relationship without sharing a home, according to new figures from the national statistics office, CBS. The numbers offer a snapshot of how relationships in the country are gradually changing, and how they vary a great deal by age and sex.
The headline numbers
At the start of 2025, 5.7 million adults in the Netherlands were single. Most of them, 4.4 million, were living alone, while 627,000 were single parents, and some were living with their own parents.
Living alone and being single are not the same thing, however. Of all adults, 60 percent were living with a partner in 2025, and 30 percent said they had no long-term partner. The remaining 10 percent were in a long-term relationship but did not live with their partner, an arrangement often described as “living apart together”.
Both of those groups have grown slowly over time. In 2013, 27 percent of adults were single; by 2025 the figure was 30 percent, having briefly touched 31 percent in 2024. The share of people “living apart together” edged up from 8 percent to 10 percent over the same period.
Single at the beginning and end of adult life
One of the clearest patterns is that being single is most common at the two ends of adult life. Among young people under 25, most are single: 62 percent have no long-term partner, and only 8 percent live with one, while 29 percent have a partner they do not live with. From the age of 25, the share living together rises sharply, and between 35 and 75, around 70 percent of people live with a partner.
At the other end of the age range, living alone becomes common again. Among people aged 75 and over, around 42 percent live alone and have no long-term partner, a group made up largely of those whose partner has died. Just over half in this oldest group still live with a partner.
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A gender gap that flips at midlife
Overall, women are slightly more likely to be single (32 percent) than men (28 percent), but the picture changes across the life course. Among the youngest adults, single men outnumber single women: 69 percent of men under 25 say they have no long-term partner, compared with 55 percent of young women. Two factors help explain this, according to CBS: up to around the age of 40 there are slightly more men than women, and in heterosexual couples men tend to be a little older than their partners.
From the mid-40s onwards, the balance tips the other way, and single women come to outnumber single men. Part of the reason lies in what happens after a separation. CBS notes that men are more likely than women to find a new partner after a divorce: 68 percent of divorced women are single, against 55 percent of divorced men. Later still, the gap widens further because women, on average, live longer, so from the age of 65 and especially 75, there are clearly more single women than men. Among people whose partner has died, 90 percent are single.
Are single people less happy?
The figures also touch on happiness, and here the results are worth reading carefully, because they describe averages across large groups rather than any individual’s situation. On average, people who live with a partner report being the happiest, at 92 percent for both men and women. Those with a long-term partner they do not live with come next, at 87 percent, and single people report the lowest average happiness.
Within that, there is a notable difference between the sexes: single women are somewhat more likely to say they are happy (82 percent) than single men (76 percent). It is worth stressing that even among single men, a clear majority describe themselves as happy, and being satisfied with life takes many forms. The vast majority of people who do have a partner, around 93 percent, say they are satisfied with them, whether or not they live together.
A gradual shift
None of these changes is dramatic from one year to the next, but together they point to a slow, steady trend towards more people living outside a traditional shared household, whether by circumstance or by choice. It is a shift with practical consequences too, from the demand for smaller homes in an already stretched housing market to the way society supports a growing number of older people living on their own.