Europe's minimum-income benefits do not raise single people above poverty lines

“Here the thing is to adapt. A person gets used to living with very little,” says Ana Hernández. She lives alone in La Palma, Spain, in what was once the laundry room of her parents’ house and which she has been renovating with her own hands. She says that, for some time now, she has been living on about 700 euros a month. Part of it comes from the Spain’s national minimum-income benefit (Ingreso Mínimo Vital, IMV, in Spanish) and the rest from the Canary Islands version of the benefit (Renta Canaria de Ciudadanía, RAI). Since the COVID-19 pandemic, she has strung together stretches working as a cleaner with others during which she has hit “zero euros,” she says, and has resorted to the IMV.

If Ana lived in France, she would have been able to access a similar benefit: the Revenu de solidarité active (RSA). The same thing would have happened to her in Ireland, but with the Supplementary Welfare Allowance (SWA) or, in Belgium, with the Revenu d’Intégration.

While the names, amounts and requirements differ, most European countries have some type of means-tested minimum-income benefit, such as the IMV. States seek to provide an income floor to allow people to escape instability and the daily stress of not knowing if they will be able to afford bread, electricity or water. “What is intended is a minimum income system that allows the person to live a dignified life,” says Helder Ferreira, head of European Affairs and Alliances at EAPN-ES, a European network of social organizations that work on poverty and social exclusion.

Although the background is the same, each country has built its income benefit in its own way: the amounts differ, as does who can receive them and under what conditions. For example: in Spain you must be at least 23 years old to apply for the IMV and in France you must be 25 years old to obtain the RSA, while in most countries you can apply from age 18. The required residency for eligibility also varies: Spain requires one year of residence, Italy and France require five and Denmark requires nine years of residence to qualify for the income benefit.

What most of them have in common is that they are not a fixed amount per person but instead are calculated per household. As a general rule, amounts are set according to cohabitation unit: a person living alone, like Ana, will not receive the same as a couple or a family with two more mouths to feed. How they do calculate benefits for each type of household distinguishes European countries from each other.

For a person who lives alone, the maximum benefit is barely over 200 euros per month in Portugal or Greece. In Germany it exceeds 500 euros and in France it is around 600 euros, while in Spain it reaches 733.6 euros. In Belgium, the Netherlands or Luxembourg, the aid is well over 1,000 euros. If there are two adults and two children in the household, the range is even wider: the amounts can reach up to 4,000 euros per month, although in most countries it is close to 1,000 euros.

In reality, the figures themselves say little on their own: 50 euros in Cyprus goes further than its equivalent in kroner in Denmark. To understand the real spending power of each benefit, we must compare it to income levels and the cost of living in each country. Almost every country shares this paradox: income benefits do not reach the EU-defined poverty line. That is, the benefits do not provide enough income on their own to put beneficiaries above the income level each country uses to define being at risk of poverty. In fact, in Estonia, Latvia, and Croatia, the benefit for a single person does not even reach the more severe cases of households that earn less than 40% of a country’s median income.

“Although widespread stability has been observed in virtually all Member States in recent years, financial support is not sufficient to lift people out of poverty,” reads a European Commission (EC) 2025 document on minimum incomes. In its recommendations, the EC encourages countries to match the benefit with the poverty line or with “the monetary value of necessary goods and services, including adequate food, housing, health care and essential services, in accordance with national definitions”. Caritas Europa, advocates for income benefits that “reach at least 75% of the national poverty line for all types of households.”

“It is impossible for the poverty rate to drop much,” due to Spain’s income benefit says sociologist José Antonio Noguera. But the benefit does have an effect. If the threshold is 900 euros, he explains, a person receiving 600 euros in the form a national income benefit will continue to count as poor even if an additional benefit raises their income to 899 euros. The difference is that before they were 300 euros short of reaching the threshold and now they are only one euro short. The intensity of poverty, he says, “has been reduced a lot as a result of the IMV, and also other regional benefits.”

In 2024, the latest data provided by Spain’s Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF), which is in charge of evaluating the IMV, show that the benefit reduced the intensity of poverty by 30.3%, while it only succeeded in raising people above the poverty line in a much smaller 9.5% of cases.

For minimum income benefits to work, it is important that those who qualify actually obtain the benefits. The issue is not only that the IMV helps relatively few people to cross the statistical poverty line, but that a large number of qualifying households are not obtaining the benefit. In its report, AIReF wrote that the IMV is at “approximately at 50% of its capacity,” which means that it could reach almost twice the population it now does.

Even if it reached all households that are entitled to receive it, the IMV would not be able to cover all their needs on its own. This also happens in other countries. Experts say it is important to use multiple policies, without putting all the burden on income benefits. Ferreira says minimum incomes function as “a starting point” that must be coordinated with other specific benefits and support in areas such as housing, health, education and justice. Noguera says, “you cannot fight poverty with a policy alone.”

Improve something necessary

In 2023, with Giorgia Meloni at the helm of the government, Italy reformed its minimum income system: the Reddito di Cittadinanza (RdC) was replaced by the Assegno di Inclusione (AdI) and the Supporto per la Formazione e il Lavoro (SFL). The reform significantly reduced the number of families eligible for income benefits. The AdI was reserved for households with at least one child, a person with a disability or a member over 60 years of age. People of working age who do not meet these requirements can access the SFL, an aid of 500 euros per month that can be received for a maximum of 12 months. Caritas Italia noted in a report that the reform reduced the number of beneficiary households, which went from 1.4 million between April 2021 and January 2022 to about 650,000 in 2024, with a slight increase in 2025. The organization criticizes that the new system “significantly reduces the number of beneficiaries, excludes a significant part of families in situations of extreme poverty and assumes lower average amounts for many households, with the exception of those with members with disabilities.”

With the aim of avoiding these steps backwards in the fight against poverty, European civil society organisations have been calling for years for minimum income programmes that can be extrapolated to all the countries of the European Union. María Segurado, a practising lawyer and member of the legal guidance and advocacy team of Cáritas Española, proposes seeking “a minimum income promoted by the EU.” In the same vein, EAPN Europe has been calling for a directive for years that establishes common criteria for all Member States. In 2023, the European Union already made a series of recommendations, pointing out aspects that countries should improve, but it did not oblige them to do so. “The recommendation points a finger at what is necessary,” Ferreira says, but its scope practically ends there. For this reason, EAPN calls for progress towards a stronger directive and allows “a further step to be taken to focus on the fact that these systems are necessary and have to continue to improve and expand.”

Ideally, Ferreira suggests, no one would need minimum income benefits, with the rest of the social protection system sufficing. But, as long as this is not the case, he insists that these benefits fulfil a necessary function, and not just for the lifelong poor. “Most of us are just not aware that we can suddenly be in this situation, too,” he says.

European Data Journalism Network

This article is published in collaboration with the European Data Journalism Network in the context of ChatEurope and is released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence