Europe isn't emptying. It's sorting.

The short version

• Across the EU, the share of citizens emigrating is the same as in 2013. Europe is not emptying.
• But departures are rising in Italy, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, and where we can see who is leaving — in Germany and Italy — they are disproportionately young or highly educated.
• The pressure behind it is real and mostly home-made: six lost years of growth in Europe's industrial core, homes priced out of reach in its fastest-growing economies, and states that spend more than they collect.
• The wish to leave is near a record high, and official statistics see departures only a year after they happen. The early signs — the mood in several countries, the tax research, the steady growth of digital hedges — are rising.
• For Europeans, the best exits are usually other European countries. The door is open, and it is closer than the loudest voices admit.

A record mood, a flat head count

In August 2025, the number of people registered as unemployed in Germany passed three million for the first time in a decade. In the same year, 288,579 German citizens moved abroad and 191,890 came back: a net loss of about 97,000, a record. The three most popular destinations of those who left were all European: Switzerland (23,000), Austria (14,000) and Spain (10,000). In Italy, a record 155,732 people left in 2024, by the Migrantes foundation's count. In France, a country where departures are actually falling, the share of adults who say they would like to leave for good more than doubled in twelve months.

These are not viral posts. They are official figures, and they are what the conversation about "leaving Europe" is really made of.

The wish to go is near a record high. In 2025, 21 per cent of adults across the EU told Gallup they would like to move permanently to another country, up from 16 per cent a year earlier. In France the figure more than doubled in a single year, from 11 to 27 per cent.

Now the number almost nobody shares. Across the whole EU, citizens emigrating numbered 1.30 million in 2013 and 1.29 million in 2024. Per thousand residents, 2.94 then and 2.86 now. Eurostat's line is flat.

Both are true, and the gap between them is the story. The wish to leave is near a record high. The act of leaving is concentrated in a handful of countries and groups. And the reasons behind both are real, measurable, and mostly home-made.

Europe isn't emptying. It's sorting.

The mood runs ahead of the movement

How many Germans "want to leave" depends entirely on how you ask. YouGov (April 2025, 2,069 people) found 49 per cent can imagine it. The DeZIM panel found 21 per cent consider it, but only 2 per cent plan to go within a year. The number who actually left, net of returners, was about 0.14 per cent of German citizens (our calculation from Destatis).

That gap is usually used to wave the mood away. It shouldn't be. When one in five adults on a continent would rather live elsewhere, that is a political fact, whether or not they pack. And the mood is sharpest where it matters most for the future: the "Jugend in Deutschland 2026" study found 21 per cent of 14-to-29-year-olds with concrete plans to leave Germany, and 41 per cent who can imagine it.

Look at the history and the present stands out, but not as unprecedented. Gallup's EU-wide measure sat at 19 per cent in 2007–09, 22 per cent in 2013–14 at the height of the euro crisis, and 17 per cent in 2021–22. Today's 21 per cent is near the top of that range. France is the outlier: Gallup calls its jump from 11 to 27 per cent relatively unmatched anywhere in the world since it began asking in 2007. One piece of context: 11 per cent was an unusually low reading — France's own series ran between 14 and 25 per cent from 2008 to 2023 — so 27 per cent is the highest on record, but partly a snap-back from a trough. It came alongside a collapse in trust in government to 29 per cent.

Beware, too, of the numbers that travel fastest. "Half of high earners and two thirds of employees want to leave Germany" was repeated all spring. It comes from one survey of 1,000 people that the pollster Appinio ran for the job platform Indeed in May 2026. The two-thirds means "would consider a job abroad", and 65 per cent of those meant a temporary stay. The "half" is 54 per cent of households earning at least €6,000 net a month who had searched or applied for jobs abroad in the past year — and the size of that subgroup was never published.

The mood is not rising everywhere: in Germany the DeZIM figures have barely moved across five waves, while in France and in the EU average they have jumped. Why do both sides over-read intention data? Because it serves them. For those who want to say Europe is finished, "one in two could imagine leaving" is proof. For those who want to say all is well, "only 2 per cent plan to go" is proof. Both treat a survey answer as a prediction. It is neither a prediction nor noise. It is a measure of how much a person still believes the place they live will work out for them — and on that measure, a lot of Europeans are losing faith.

Search data shows who is moving from thought to research. General interest has not risen: Google searches for "auswandern" have hovered around the same level since 2022. What has risen is narrower and more telling. German searches for "Wegzug" in the tax sense averaged about 73 in 2026 against about 31 in 2023, and "Wegzugsteuer" (exit tax) has grown from almost nothing. In Britain, "leaving the UK" has more than doubled since 2023.

The dreamers are not moving. The people with assets, skills and options are doing their homework.

Who is sorting out

The flat EU line hides two opposite movements. Since 2013, citizens leaving per thousand residents has risen in Sweden, Italy, Germany and Denmark, and fallen sharply in Ireland, Poland and Portugal — the countries that used to export their young and now keep more of them.

Italy is the clearest genuine drain. Citizens leaving rose from about 99,000 in 2022 to about 156,000 in 2024 by the national count. Italians aged 20 to 34 emigrating rose from 53,807 in 2019 to 71,409 in 2024. ISTAT counts a net loss of 58,000 graduates in 2019–23, though its count for 2025 fell to about 109,000 departures, with a registration change muddying the comparison. Striking detail: this happened while Italian unemployment fell from 9.9 to 5.8 per cent, so it is not simply a lack of jobs. No statistic records why Italians leave, but one number fits the pattern: contractual real wages are still 8.6 per cent below 2019.

Germany is the country everyone quotes, and the head count is small: about 0.14 per cent of citizens a year, net. The question is who. A 2021 study from the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study, found that 85 per cent of employed German emigrants are university graduates, against about a third of the population at home. It also asked why people go: almost 58 per cent gave professional reasons, 45 per cent a wish to change their personal circumstances, and only 17 per cent said dissatisfaction with life in Germany was a significant factor — a reminder that people leave for pull as well as push, though the survey pre-dates the energy crisis. A country can keep its population stable and still lose skills and future tax revenue, if those who leave are its most mobile earners.

Sweden shows a rise of about half since 2013, but only 23,300 of the 38,600 who left in 2025 were born in Sweden. The register records no reasons, and we will not invent them.

Spain looks dramatic in headlines, but its jump is a statistical break in 2021. On INE's consistent series, Spanish-born emigration fell from 102,693 in 2021 to 88,243 in 2024, 29,382 of them aged 16 to 34, and Spaniards' own net flow in 2024 was a small positive, +6,616, while the country as a whole took in a net 626,268 people. Young Spaniards are squeezed, but they are not fleeing.

Poland, Portugal and Ireland show what happens when a country starts to deliver. Poland's own count of Poles living abroad fell to 1.513 million at the end of 2025, from more than 1.55 million in 2020–23. Portugal recorded 80,100 departures in 2024, against a peak of 134,600 in 2014. Ireland lost a net 5,200 of its own citizens in the year to April 2026 — 35,400 left, 30,200 came back — while the country as a whole gained 48,100 people. A decade ago these were the continent's great exporters of young talent. Growth, jobs and rising wages probably help keep more of them at home, even as housing has become their new problem.

The UK, outside the EU, lost 246,000 British nationals in 2025, down 4 per cent on the year, for a net outflow of 136,000. The ONS has changed its methods, so the level cannot be compared cleanly with earlier years.

Where they go is revealing: mostly to other European neighbours. Germans living in Austria rose from 157,793 in 2013 to 239,452 at the start of 2025. Switzerland gained a net 14,456 German citizens in 2025. Italians in Spain nearly doubled, from 178,318 to 345,777. People are not escaping Europe. They are choosing another part of it.

The verdict the data delivers

Forget the viral posts. The official numbers alone are a harsh judgement on how much of Europe has been run since 2019.

Six lost years in the north. Germany's real GDP in 2025 was just 0.8 per cent above 2019. Finland's was 1.3 per cent, Austria's 2.9 per cent. Over the same period the EU grew 7.4 per cent, Spain 10.2 and Poland 18.3 (our calculations from Eurostat).

Households got little. Real disposable income per head rose 2.7 per cent in Germany between 2019 and 2024, and not at all in Finland — against 6.1 per cent for the EU and 13–15 per cent in Greece and Poland. A German family works as hard as in 2019, pays more for everything, and is barely better off.

Look closer and the picture gets sharper. Poland's real wages are up about 23 per cent since 2019 (our calculation from GUS wages and Eurostat prices). Italy's contractual real wages are still 8.6 per cent below 2019, according to ISTAT. French purchasing power fell again in the second quarter of 2026. British real pay has barely moved. Prices are the common thread: up 25 per cent in Germany since 2019, 23 per cent across the euro area and 47 per cent in Poland. Where wages ran faster than prices, people feel it. Where they did not, they feel that too.

Factories are shrinking. German industrial production averaged 12 per cent below 2019 in 2025 and was 14 per cent below in July 2026. Car output is 11 per cent down, and car-industry employment is the lowest since 2005. Chemicals run at 70 per cent capacity, a level the industry association VCI calls a historical low.

Honesty cuts both ways here. German autos are shrinking, not dead: revenue is flat, and orders for electric cars from German buyers are up 64 per cent this year. The chemical slump is European, not only German — euro-area chemical output is down 17.7 per cent. The economic institutes' autumn forecast of 24 September 2026 expects 1.3 per cent growth this year and a record nine-month order backlog for manufacturers. But it also expects just 0.4 per cent in 2028. A recovery that fades within two years is not a recovery that keeps a 30-year-old engineer at home.

The jobs story has flipped. Unemployment is now rising in the rich north and falling in the south. Finland is at 9.9 per cent, second only to Spain in the EU. Sweden went from 6.9 to 8.9 per cent, Germany from 2.9 to 4.0. Germany's registered jobless passed three million in August 2025 and stood at 3.06 million in August 2026. Italy, once the problem child, went from 9.9 to 5.8 per cent.

Spain, meanwhile, has a record 22.78 million people in work. Youth unemployment is down from 30.7 to 22.9 per cent, and the share of young people on temporary contracts has fallen from 69.5 to 44.4 per cent. The south's labour market is not fixed, but it is moving in the right direction. The north's is moving the wrong way.

And where the jobs came from matters. Between 2019 and 2024, public administration, education and health — a Eurostat group that also covers private schools, clinics and care homes — supplied more than all of Germany's net new jobs: 894,000 in those sectors, against 669,000 overall, which means the rest of the economy shed jobs. The same group supplied 81 per cent of Finland's net new jobs, 64 per cent of Poland's and half of Austria's, but only 19 per cent of France's, where the rest of the economy created over a million. In Germany, Finland and Poland, then, most of the new work has been in sectors that depend heavily on public money and on an ageing population. That is not the sign of a dynamic private economy — though a growing care sector is not, by itself, waste.

This is not decline everywhere. It is a split between economies that adapted after 2019 and those that did not — and the ones that did not include the continent's industrial core. Mario Draghi put numbers on why: EU electricity costs two to three times US levels, gas four to five times, and Europe needs €750–800 billion a year of extra investment to catch up. Two years on, it is our view that the report is quoted far more often than it is acted on; the figures in this section are what that looks like from a household's kitchen table.

Housing: growth did not buy a home

If one number explains why young Europeans feel robbed of a future, it is this: in 2024, 53.8 per cent of Poles aged 25 to 34 still lived with their parents. So did 49.8 per cent of Italians, 48.3 per cent of Spaniards, 43.6 per cent of Portuguese and 42.2 per cent of the Irish, against 29.7 per cent across the EU (Eurostat).

The cruelty is where it got worse. Poland grew 18 per cent in six years and its real wages about 23 per cent — yet the share of young adults at home rose from 43.9 to 53.8 per cent. Ireland's rose from 33.2 to 42.2 per cent. House prices between 2019 and 2025 rose 86 per cent in Portugal, 77 per cent in Poland, 61 per cent in the Netherlands, 47 per cent in Ireland and 45 per cent in Spain, against 34 per cent for the EU. In Europe's fastest-growing economies, growth did not buy affordability. Governments celebrated the GDP and left the young to pay for it in rent.

In Europe's fastest-growing economies, growth did not buy affordability.

Spain shows how the pressure really works. It is not the income tax: at roughly the minimum wage, employee tax and social security take only about 9 per cent. It is a thin wage floor meeting a thin supply of homes. The most common Spanish wage is €16,520 a year. House prices rose 44.8 per cent while mean wages rose 21.1 per cent. The Bank of Spain estimates a shortfall of about 750,000 homes over 2021–25, and young renters in Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga and Valencia face nearly half their net income going on rent. The Netherlands, by its own government's count, is short about 384,000 homes.

Spaniards leave home at 30.2 on average, against 26.3 across the EU — though it was already 28.4 in 2010, and Italians leave just as late. Among 25-to-29-year-olds, 69.8 per cent of Spaniards still live with their parents, against 41.8 per cent for the EU. Spain has raised its minimum wage by 35.7 per cent since 2019, about 11.7 per cent in real terms. But the median wage, €24,497, is up only about 2 per cent in real terms — about 8 per cent for 25-to-29-year-olds. The floor has risen; the middle has barely moved.

The pressure is not the same everywhere. In France, Italy and Belgium, house prices relative to incomes are below their 2015 level on the OECD's measure, and official rent indices grew slower than prices, though they understate new lets. The acute housing story is a Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal, Poland and Spain story. In Ireland, 59 per cent of citizens name housing as their country's top issue, against 13 per cent across the EU.

This is not a market accident. Housing supply is decided by planning rules, permits and public investment. In our reading, it is a policy failure, made slowly, over years, in plain sight.

The state: taking more than most, promising more than it collects

Europe taxes work more heavily than any other rich region. On an average single salary, the state and social insurance take 52.5 per cent of labour costs in Belgium, 49.3 in Germany, 47.2 in France, 47.1 in Austria and 45.8 in Italy — against an OECD average of 35.1, the UK at 32.4 and Switzerland at 23.0 (OECD, 2025). Switzerland, with the lightest burden in that list, gained a net 14,456 German citizens in 2025 — though tax is unlikely to be the only reason.

The common complaint that "taxes keep rising" is, strictly, wrong: revenue as a share of GDP fell between 2019 and 2024 in France, Germany, Sweden and Denmark. The real problem is worse. Across the EU, spending rose 2.3 points of GDP while revenue fell 0.2. The difference was borrowed, and it will be repaid by the same young people now priced out of a flat.

• France spends 57.5 per cent of GDP through the state, the most in the euro area, runs a 5.1 per cent deficit, and has suspended its 2023 pension reform.
• Italy carries debt of 137.1 per cent of GDP and pays 3.9 per cent of GDP in interest alone.
• Poland raised spending from 41.4 to 49.4 per cent of GDP since 2019; its own fiscal council calls the imbalance lasting and deep.
• Ten EU states are now in an excessive-deficit procedure, including France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Finland and Poland.

The independent watchdogs are saying it themselves. Sweden's fiscal council called its February 2026 report its most serious criticism to date — while also noting the labour market is better than the policy debate suggests. Ireland's council warns that of every €6 of corporation tax, €5 is on track to be spent and only €1 saved. Britain's Office for Budget Responsibility expects the tax take to reach a post-war high of around 38 per cent of GDP by 2030–31. Spain and Poland are the exceptions: Spain's revenue did rise, from 39.0 to 42.3 per cent of GDP.

Where did the money go? Not mainly into civil servants' pay: the government wage bill is flat at about 10.2 per cent of GDP across the EU between 2019 and 2024, with Poland the main exception. The rise came from pensions, health, interest and, more recently, defence. In other words, Europe is spending more to stand still — to pay for ageing, for past debts and for a more dangerous neighbourhood — while spending little extra on the things that would make the next generation richer.

People notice. Trust in national government is 37 per cent across the EU (Eurobarometer, spring 2026), 41 per cent in Germany, and just 21 per cent in France and Greece. When citizens stop believing the state will deliver, emigration stops being a fantasy and becomes a plan B.

What the statistics cannot see

This is where the view from the street and the view from the spreadsheet part company — and where both are partly right.

Official migration statistics count people who have formally left, and they count them late. Germany's figure for 2025 arrived in June 2026. A family that decided this month to go will not appear in any register until next year's release. Several kinds of departure hardly appear at all:

• The remote worker who keeps a home address and a home employer while living most of the year in Lisbon, Valencia or Bali.
• The second home that became the first, without anyone deregistering.
• The company that moved before its founder. Estonia's e-Residency programme now counts 144,647 e-residents and 44,082 companies founded by them. Germans hold 9,020 e-residencies, Spaniards 8,132, Finns 7,282, the French 6,707 and Italians 5,912. Spaniards have founded more of these companies than any other nationality: 3,663. None of them left anything in a migration table. Adjusted for population, the picture flips from the usual story. Finland has about 1,300 e-residents per million people, Spain about 170 and Germany about 110 (our calculation). The loudest exodus narrative is about wealthy Germans. Per head, Finland's take-up is twelve times Germany's — though Finland's closeness to Estonia probably explains some of that (our inference), and Finland has only 18 companies per 100 e-residents. Spaniards turn their e-residency into a company more often than any other large nationality — about 45 companies per 100 e-residents, against 37 for Germans. The figures record citizenship, not where people live.
• The plan in progress: the search for "Wegzugsteuer", the call to a tax adviser, the school visit abroad.

A word of caution on that last example, because it is often mis-sold. e-Residency is a government-issued digital identity: for a €150 state fee and an identity check, it lets you set up and run an EU company online without living in Estonia. It is not a tax residency — the programme says so itself — and it gives no right to live or work in Estonia; that is a separate Digital Nomad Visa, which requires earnings of at least €4,500 net a month. The count has grown steadily rather than exploded, from 64,113 in 2019 to 133,825 in 2025. What it measures is not people leaving but people building an exit option — a company and a bank account in a second jurisdiction, just in case.

The mood behind that "just in case" is measurable too. In September 2026, 68 per cent of respondents in 15 countries told the European Council on Foreign Relations that they describe Europe in terms of deterioration or a loss of normality. Cost of living tops the list of worries, reportedly at 36 per cent nationally and 52 per cent personally — figures we have from secondary reports and could not check against the primary study. Trust in the macro and geopolitical picture is the missing variable in every emigration model: official data cannot record it, and it moves long before people do.

None of this proves an exodus the official data is missing. It shows that official data measures the last step of a long process, and that the earlier steps — the mood in several countries, the tax research, the hedge — are rising or growing steadily.

Energy, war and America: real shocks, not the whole story

Energy. Losing Russian gas was a real, measured blow: Russia's share of EU gas imports fell from 40.9 to 11.7 per cent between 2021 and 2024, European wholesale gas went from $16 to $40 per mmbtu in a year, and Draghi estimates it cost the EU more than a year of growth. But energy explains only about a sixth of the rise in prices since 2019 (our calculation), and some of the damage was, in our view, a policy choice: Germany shut its last nuclear plants, taking output from 75 terawatt-hours in 2019 to zero in 2024, and spent €158 billion shielding consumers from the bills — more than it has committed to Ukraine.

War. Security raises the temperature. German military service became law on 1 January 2026, the first call-ups went out in July, and applications for conscientious-objector status reached 8,302 by the end of July, against 3,867 in all of 2025. That is objection, not emigration: no serious statistic yet ties war fear to people leaving.

The bill for security is real, and it will be paid in taxes and forgone investment. At NATO's Hague summit in June 2025, members committed to at least 3.5 per cent of GDP on core defence by 2035. German core defence spending is heading from 1.16 per cent of GDP in 2014 to 2.69 per cent in 2026 — roughly €69 billion a year more (our calculation). Three quarters of Poles and Swedes name Russia as their country's greatest threat.

Yet by the measure people usually mean by "safe", Europe still leads the world. On the 2026 Global Peace Index, seven of the ten most peaceful countries in the world are European: Iceland first, Switzerland third, Slovenia fourth, Ireland fifth, Austria sixth, Portugal seventh and Finland ninth. Poland rose 23 places, the biggest improvement anywhere. Germany is 28th, the UK 39th and France 99th, the least peaceful country in Western and Central Europe. Security raises the temperature of the conversation about leaving, especially among the young — but nothing we can verify shows it emptying a single city.

America. In May 2026 only 11 per cent of Europeans told the European Council on Foreign Relations the US is an ally, half the share of November 2024. Among Germans, searches for emigrating to the US and to Dubai fell this year.

About half of Europeans now call the US a "necessary partner" and a quarter a rival or adversary. Pew's 2026 survey finds Hungary the only one of ten European countries with a majority favourable to the US, and the share seeing it as a reliable partner down by 28 to 52 points in eight of them. The economic tie remains large: EU goods exports to the US equal 2.9 per cent of EU GDP and a fifth of all exports outside the EU, and the August 2025 trade framework caps tariffs at 15 per cent. Few Europeans call America an enemy; a growing number no longer see it as a reliable partner.

Where the doors are open

If this article stopped at the verdict, it would be half the truth. The same official data hold some of the best news in it.

For Europeans, 26 doors are already open. An EU citizen can live in another member state for three months without formalities and gain permanent residence after five years. That is why most departing Europeans go to Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Portugal rather than overseas. Meanwhile doors for the wealthy and for non-Europeans are closing: Spain abolished its investor visa in April 2025, the EU Court of Justice struck down Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, Portugal lengthened naturalisation to 7–10 years in May 2026, and the Netherlands' expat tax ruling shrinks from 2027. The easiest places for a European to move to are other European countries.

Some of Europe is getting much better. The EU employment rate for 20-to-64-year-olds reached 76.1 per cent in 2025, up from 72.7 in 2019. Greek unemployment fell from 27.8 per cent in 2013 to 8.9 per cent in 2025, and citizen emigration halved. Portugal has run three straight budget surpluses.

The biggest gains are in the countries that used to send their young away. Greece's employment rate rose from 60.8 to 71.0 per cent between 2019 and 2025, Spain's from 68.0 to 72.4, Italy's from 63.5 to 67.6. Spain's economy is 11.9 per cent larger than at the end of 2019, against 7.5 per cent for the euro area. Portugal, with unemployment down from 6.7 to 5.7 per cent, has brought its debt just under 90 per cent of GDP, according to the IMF. Euro-area employment as a whole is 5.9 per cent above its end-2019 level (our calculation). Twelve years ago, a young Greek or Spaniard had every reason to leave. Today, many have reasons to stay — and some to come back.

Europe still attracts more people than it loses. Gallup's Potential Net Migration Index — adults worldwide who would like to move in, minus those who would like to move out — rose for the EU from +24 in 2015–17 to +40 in 2023–25. Germany scores +53, France +44, the Netherlands +43, Spain +74 and Portugal +125. Italy has swung from −8 to +25. Wanting is not moving, as Gallup notes, but the world still wants to be here.

So the useful question is not "how bad is Europe?" It is "which part of Europe, or of the world, fits the life I want — and what would it take to get there?"

What would turn a trickle into a flow

The mood is loaded. Three things could set it off.

1. Growth that does not come back. The German institutes forecast 1.3 per cent growth in 2026 but only 0.4 per cent in 2028. If the north-central economies stay stuck and Finland's labour market does not turn, emigration will follow hiring — young graduates first.
2. A tax shock on mobile people. Rising "Wegzug" searches show people with assets already researching exits. Wealth-tax decisions and exit-tax changes will be the test. If those departures show up in official data, the "millionaire exodus" stops being a marketing story.
3. Debt that stops being cheap. France and Italy already pay 2.2 and 3.9 per cent of GDP in interest. A bond-market shock forcing sharp austerity could turn France's 21 per cent trust and 27 per cent wish to leave into action.

And three things would prove me wrong: a German economy that surprises on the upside, energy prices that fall for good, or evidence that the flows to Switzerland and Austria are mostly returning citizens and dual nationals.

Why my own family is leaving

I should declare the obvious: I am not only writing about this. My family is leaving too, and our reasons are the ones this article keeps finding in the data.

The first is tax. I build digital ventures, and that work can be done from almost anywhere. The section on the state shows how heavily Europe taxes work; for a founder, that weight falls twice, on the company and on the person, and it leaves too little to reinvest in the next venture. In our reading, Europe has made itself an expensive place to build things.

The second is personal. My two sons are over 18. I watch European governments talk about conscription and prepare for a long confrontation with Russia, and I do not want my sons' futures decided by politicians' plans for war. The section on energy, war and America says, honestly, that no statistic yet ties war fear to people leaving. Our family is one data point. But it is exactly the kind of decision the registers will record only after it has been made.

The third is the cost of living. Germany's real wages are back where they were in 2019 (Destatis: 100.0 in 2025 against 100.5 in 2019), but prices are up 25 per cent, and for our family it is the level of prices, not the trend in pay, that stings.

None of this makes Europe a bad place. It makes it, for us, the wrong place for the next ten years — which is precisely the sorting this article describes.

If you are the one deciding

A verdict on Europe won't help you. A sorting tool might.

• Young, in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland or Ireland? In Spain, where the data lets us check, the binding constraint is rent against pay, not income tax; in the others, check your own numbers. Either way, look first at a cheaper city, or a country where the ratio works — often inside the EU.
• In Germany, Austria, Finland or Sweden? The pressure is in the labour market. Watch your sector, not the headlines.
• Driven by tax? Know the difference between leaving tax residence and changing citizenship, and check how exit taxes and inheritance rules follow you. There are no shortcuts, only mechanics.
• Driven by cost of living? Do the arithmetic on your own budget in the destination, with real rents, before you fall in love with a view.
• Driven by fear? Separate policy risks (conscription, taxes, a debt crisis) from mood. Moods travel with you. And never stake your future on a single volatile asset.

A closing thought. The feeling that Europe is in trouble is neither propaganda nor paranoia. In Germany and Finland it is a labour market. In France it is a budget and a broken trust. In Spain, Italy and Poland it is the price of a home. Across the continent it is a sense that those in charge have been managing decline rather than reversing it. The people acting on that feeling first are the young, the skilled and the mobile — the people Europe can least afford to lose.

But a mood of exit is also a mood of search: people looking for a place where they can live freely, build something and enjoy their lives. That is one of the oldest human instincts, and Europeans have more room to act on it than almost anyone in history. Expectat exists to make that search clear-eyed. Whether you stay, move within Europe or leave it, you deserve to choose from hope, not from fear.

Method, limits and sources

Official statistics first; surveys named with sponsor and sample; market data labelled as such; "our calculation" marks our own arithmetic on published figures. Every figure traces to a source listed below; e-residents per million people are our calculation from the e-Residency dashboard and Eurostat population data. Expectat's own figures are first-party, early and self-selected, and labelled as such. Official migration data lag by up to a year and do not capture remote workers, unregistered moves or companies set up abroad. Figures are the latest available on 29 September 2026.

Left out of this article (for separate pieces): European politics and the left–right shift, immigration since 2015, and crypto as a bet for young savers.

Sources

Emigration and migration. Eurostat, Emigration by age group, sex and citizenship (migr_emi1ctz) and Population on 1 January (demo_pjan) — Eurostat. Destatis, Nettozuwanderung 2025 mit 235 000 Personen deutlich gesunken (June 2026). ISTAT, Rapporto annuale 2026. INE Spain, Estadística de Migraciones y Cambios de Residencia 2024. GUS Poland, Informacja o rozmiarach i kierunkach czasowej emigracji z Polski 2020–2025. CSO Ireland, Population and Migration Estimates April 2026. ONS, UK emigration explained (21 May 2026). Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (2021).

Intention and sentiment. Gallup, Desire to Migrate and France's political crisis rattles trust in institutions. DeZIM panel, as reported by Deutsche Welle. YouGov, Auswandern (April 2025). Jugend in Deutschland 2026 (Datajockey Verlag). Indeed/Appinio survey (May 2026), as reported by Euronews and others. European Commission, Standard Eurobarometer 105. ECFR, Home alone: Europeans are ready to defend themselves. Pew Research Center, European views of Trump and the U.S. (2026).

Economy, housing, state. Eurostat: nama_10_gdp, nama_10_a10_e, prc_hicp_aind, une_rt_m, tepsr_wc310, ilc_lvps08, yth_demo_030, prc_hpi_a, gov_10a_exp, gov_10a_main. Destatis, Reallöhne im Jahr 2025 um 1,9 % gestiegen (real-wage index). Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Arbeitsmarkt im August 2026. VDA, automobile production. VCI, Halbjahresbilanz 2026. Banco de España, Annual Report 2025. INE Spain, Encuesta Anual de Estructura Salarial 2024. OECD, Taxing Wages (2025 data) and Economic Surveys: Spain 2025. OBR, Economic and fiscal outlook, March 2026. European Commission, excessive deficit procedures. IMF Article IV consultations (Poland, Sweden, France, Portugal, Ireland). Fiscal councils of Poland, Sweden and Ireland (2026). European Commission, The future of European competitiveness (Draghi, 2024).

Energy, security, rules. Eurostat, Imports of natural gas (nrg_ti_gas). Kiel Institute, Ukraine Support Tracker. Bruegel, National policies to shield consumers from rising energy prices. NATO, The Hague Summit Declaration and Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries 2026. Wehrdienst-Modernisierungsgesetz, BGBl. 2025 I Nr. 370. Institute for Economics & Peace, Global Peace Index 2026. Spain, Ley Orgánica 1/2025, BOE. Court of Justice of the EU, ruling on Malta (29 April 2025).

e-Residency. Republic of Estonia, e-Residency dashboard and e-Residency vs Digital Nomad Visa.