People: how Poles live, work and feel

Twelve numbers that describe not the state but the people. Nine of them show a society wealthier, better educated and more satisfied with life than the stereotype allows; two — marriages and life expectancy — show where Poland lags the rest of the Union; one — median age — says where it is heading.

Two surprises for a reader from abroad: Poland is one of the least urbanised countries in the EU (59% of the population in towns and cities against an EU average of 75%) and one of the most “family-based” — households are larger, and there are a third fewer one-person households than the EU average.

Poland is not (yet) an old country — it is the country ageing fastest. In ten years the median age rose by 3.8 years, almost twice as fast as in the Union, and the youth advantage of more than three years in 2015 shrank to a year and a half. The share of seniors jumped from 15% to 21% — in 1990 it was 10%, while children under 15 were then 24% of the population (today 14%).

The pace, not the level, is the real message of this chart: the process the rest of Europe spread over two generations is happening in Poland within one. Its causes — record-low fertility and the post-2004 emigration — and its consequences for the labour market and pensions are covered in chapter 15.

Two Polands on one map. Warsaw with its ring is growing (11% in a decade — more than many a European state), and so is Pomerania with the Tricity; Lesser Poland and Greater Poland hold steady. All the rest is shrinking, most sharply the eastern borderlands and the Kielce region, but also Silesia, the Opole region and Łódź. Mazovia shows why the map has seventeen fields rather than sixteen: as a whole it grew 3%, but without Warsaw it lost 7% — as much as Podlaskie.

This is a map of internal migration and fertility, not only of emigration: the young move to five or six metropolises, and the regions they leave are at the same time the oldest (chapter 15, map of the 65+ share) and the poorest (the regional-GDP map in the same chapter).

In 2010 Poles married a third more often per thousand inhabitants than the average European; in 2024 the two lines crossed. Not because Poles divorce more often — the divorce rate has stood still for fifteen years, exactly at the EU level — but because the wedding is postponed and ever more often skipped: women marry almost three years later than in 2010, men more than three, and the share of births outside marriage rose from 21% to 29% (EU: 41%).

Read it together with the next chart: Poles leave the family home later, marry later, become parents slightly earlier than other Europeans — and have the fewest children in their history (chapter 15).

More than 20 percentage points above the EU average: every second Pole between 25 and 35, and almost three in five men of that age, live with their parents. Behind it are housing prices (chapter 15), late marriages and a multi-generation family model that shows up in the statistics as one of the largest households in the Union and one of the lowest shares of people living alone.

An honest nuance: those who do move out do so at an age close to the EU's (26.8 against 26.3) — and earlier than as recently as 2021. The family home in Poland is thus not a trap with no exit, but a longer stop: cheaper, comfortable and socially accepted.

Poland is a country of educated women: more than half of Polish women under 35 hold a degree, more than in the EU, and women make up two-thirds of university graduates — the third-highest share in Europe. Men are on the other side of the average: clearly fewer of them study than in the Union, and the gap between the sexes (18 points) is two-thirds wider than the EU average. Polish women are not Europe's record-holders, though — 54.5% is the 15th result in the EU, four points above the average; Poland's record is the share of women among graduates.

The second message is less comfortable: the education boom of the 2000s is fading. The share of young people with a degree has stopped growing and is slipping, while the rest of the Union catches up — the quality of those degrees and the standing of Polish universities are the subject of chapter 7.

Poles work a lot, and almost all of them work: the employment rate, level with the EU's in 2019, is now almost three points higher, and the average working week — 40 hours — is the second longest in the Union. Part of the difference is structural (fewer part-time jobs than in the West), but even among full-time workers Poland exceeds the EU average. One in six workers is self-employed — a third more often than the EU average.

A telling juxtaposition: the country that works the longest is also one of those least often working from home — the pandemic peak of remote work (9% in 2020) quickly receded, and today 6% of Poles “usually” work remotely against 9% of Europeans and 21% of Finns.

This is one of the numbers that most surprises a reader from outside: Poles — supposedly the complainers — rate their lives 7.7 out of 10, better than the people of Germany, France, Sweden and Spain, and in the Union only Romanians and Finns score higher (Austrians and Danes share third place). The result has been stable since 2018, with a pandemic dip in 2021, and is above the EU average in every age group — seniors included, against the intuition about a “hard Polish old age”.

Context matters: this is self-assessment, not an index of living conditions, and the same nation scores below average in surveys of social trust (chapter 14). Poles are ever more satisfied with their own lives and unchangingly distrustful of others — a tension that runs through this whole portrait.

Poles know foreign languages about as often as the average European — but usually one. Almost half of adults report exactly one foreign language (EU: 38%), and only one in four two or more (EU: 37%); one Pole in twenty speaks three languages, against one European in eight. That one language is almost always English, and at a high level: in the EF index Poland is in the world's top fifteen, with the typical asymmetry — we understand and read better than we speak.

A practical takeaway for a reader from abroad: in the cities and among people under forty you will get by in English without trouble; German, once Poland's second language, has given way, and Russian survives mainly in the older generation.

The stereotype — held by Poles themselves too — is that Poles are among the tallest nations on earth. The data do not bear it out: a man born in 1996 stands 177 cm on average, which puts Poland in the fourth ten — behind the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Balts, the Balkans, the Czechs and the Germans. What is true in this story is the scale of change: in a hundred years Polish men and women grew 14 cm, fastest in the post-war decades of better nutrition and health care.

Just as important is the stall: between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts only half a centimetre was added. Adult height is a good summary measure of childhood — and it suggests that the easy reserves (better food, fewer diseases) have already been used up.

The gravest shadow in this chapter concerns neither money nor mood but the body. Poles live three years shorter than the average EU resident, and Polish men more than four; the pandemic loss has been recovered (the trough of 75.4 years in 2021), but the distance to the EU has not narrowed. One thing has clearly improved in the last decade: smoking, which fell to the EU level after decades of distinctly higher rates.

Exercise remains the weak point: only one Pole in five meets the physical-activity guidelines, and two-thirds say they never exercise — more than in any EU country except Portugal and Greece. Add the digital gap between generations: the youngest Poles are online more often than their EU peers, seniors much less often.

The three most common Polish surnames — Nowak, Kowalski, Wiśniewski — are also three types: from the “new” arrival, from the blacksmith and from the cherry tree; then come surnames from trades, places and first names, and the ending -ski, once a mark of nobility, is today the most ordinary of Polish endings. The most popular surname is borne by 198 thousand people — in a country of 37 million that is under half a percent, a sign of great surname diversity.

First names speak of the times: the parents of the 2025 cohort reach for the names of their grandparents and great-grandparents. Zofia, Antoni, Leon, Franciszek, Ignacy and Stanisław are back in the top ten, and Nikodem — a name that was a rarity twenty years ago — is today number one among boys.