Trends in relative and absolute mobility of homeownership in Europe

Homeownership has declined among younger generations in most European countries. A common assumption is that this trend is increasingly stratified by parental homeownership, due to worsening affordability and the growing importance of parental financial support. In this study, we show that this assumption does not hold for the average European. Using data from EU-SILC 2011 and 2019 across 27 European countries, we examine trends in both relative and absolute mobility of homeownership for cohorts born between 1950 and 1984. We find that individuals with homeowner parents are more likely to own a home than those with renter parents, but this difference remains stable across cohorts. This stability in relative mobility masks important and counteracting trends in absolute mobility: downward mobility increased from 16% to 36%, while upward mobility declined from 25% to 9% between those born in the 1950s and 1980s. While the absolute decline in upward mobility is smaller, its impact on relative mobility is greater due to the high and growing share of individuals with homeowner parents. The importance of the underlying distribution of parental homeownership is also evident in cross-national comparisons. While absolute mobility follows similar trends across countries, relative mobility has increased in some and declined in others. Country case studies suggest that differences in the prevalence of parental homeownership drive these divergent patterns. Our findings highlight the importance of complementing relative with absolute mobility measures, especially when analysing binary outcomes with skewed group distributions.