Continuous Household Survey. 2020

There were 3,029,300 households in Catalonia in 2020, with an average annual growth of 15,000 households since 2014, the year in which these statistics began. The average number of people per household has remained at values close to 2.5.

By the number of members, 26.0% were single-person households, 31.5% of the households contained two people, 20.1% contained three people and 22.5% contained four or more people.

The most frequent type of household was that of a single nucleus, with 2.083.000 households, accounting for 68.8% of the total. Of the above, 1,018,700 comprised couples with children, 716,400 comprised couples without children and 347,900 were single-parent nuclei (a father or mother with one or more children). Households with two or more nuclei (68,100 households) accounted for a very low percentage (2.2%), whereas households without a nucleus (878,200) accounted for 29.0% and the vast majority of these were single-person households (788,100).

The number of children aged less than 16 years living in households totalled 1,240,600, 153,900 of which (12.4%) lived in single-parent families in single nuclei households.

The percentage of people living alone was 7.1% for the population aged 20 to 34 and of 10.7% of the population aged 3 to 64 and the percentage grew considerably from the age of 65. One in five people aged 65 to 79 lived alone (24.9% of women and 12.6% of men), while in the case of people aged 80 and over was one in three (44.2% of women and 23.7% of men).

Regarding the nationality of couples, 81.7% of the total (1,838,200) were couples made up of two people of Spanish citizenship, 10.2% were made up of people of foreign nationality and 8.1% were mixed couples.

In 2020, households exclusively made up of people of foreign nationality totalled 258,700, accounting for 8.5% of the total number of households in Catalonia. The types of households made up of these people were basically households with a single nucleus comprising couples with children (37.8%) and in second place, households without a nucleus (31.5%). With regard to the size of these households, those with a single person predominated (26.0%), followed by households with two people (24.6%) and with four or more people (18.2%).

With regard to the 3,029,300 main homes in Catalonia, and in terms of tenure, 69.0% of the 3,012,500 main homes in Catalonia were owned and, of these, 828.800 (27.4% of the total) had pending payments. Rental housing accounted for 26.0% and the remaining 4.9% corresponded to other situations.

With regard to the surface area of houses, 57.6% were between 60 and 99 square meters. Houses with surface areas of less than 60 square meters accounted for 12.1%. As regards to surface per inhabitant, around 19.3% of the population lived in houses of less than 20 square meters per person.