site.btaWomen’s Pension 19.4% Lower than Men’s in 2024

In 2024, the average pension for women aged 65 or over in Bulgaria was 19.4% lower than that for men, show Eurostat data published on Wednesday. The corresponding gap in the European Union (EU) was 24.5%.

The largest gaps were recorded in Malta (40.3%), the Netherlands (36.3%) and Austria (35.6%). In contrast, the gap was smallest in Estonia (5.6%), followed by Slovakia (8.4%) and Hungary (9.6%). 

In addition to the calculations based on average pensions, Eurostat also publishes the gender gap using the median pension values, which is the middle value that separates the higher half of pensions from the lower half. Unlike the average, the median is less sensitive to a small number of extremely high or low pension values.

The median pension for women in the EU was 24.9% lower than that for men. By this indicator, the gap recorded for Bulgaria was 11.7%. The largest gaps in median pensions were recorded in Luxembourg (43.3%), Spain (41.1%) and the Netherlands (39.6%), while the smallest gaps were noted in Estonia (-0.3%), Hungary (0.4%) and Denmark (2.7%).

When comparing results in average and median terms, the largest differences were recorded in Denmark, where the gap in average pensions was 12.9 percentage points (pp) higher than that in median pensions, followed by Belgium (11.0 pp) and Hungary (9.2 pp).

In some countries, the opposite was the case, the gap in median pensions was higher than that in average pensions. Gaps in median pensions were considerably higher than those in average pensions in Spain (-11.9 pp), Luxembourg (-10.6 pp) and Portugal (-6.5 pp).