New figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) show that loneliness in the Netherlands isn’t going away — and for one group in particular, it’s getting worse.
According to CBS, 10 percent of people aged 15 and older reported feeling seriously lonely in 2025. That share has held steady at around 10 percent since 2021, up from 9 percent in the last full year before the pandemic, 2019 — a small but persistent increase that has never fully reversed.
Who’s affected most
The data paints a clearer picture of who is struggling. Severe loneliness was most common among people aged 30 to 55, with 35-to-45-year-olds (13 percent) and 45-to-55-year-olds (12 percent) reporting the highest rates of any age group — higher, notably, than either young adults or people over 55, who actually reported feeling less lonely in 2025 than in previous years.
Income also plays a clear role. People receiving social benefits reported feeling lonely at a rate 23 percent higher than those supported by work, student grants, or pensions — a gap that points to loneliness as something tangled up with financial precarity, not just social circumstance.
The immigration gap is growing
Perhaps the most striking finding involves people born outside the Netherlands, who consistently report higher rates of severe loneliness than both second-generation migrants and people of Dutch origin — a pattern CBS found in both the emotional and social dimensions of loneliness it measured. Among European immigrants specifically, the share reporting severe social loneliness rose sharply, from 17 percent in 2019 to 27 percent in 2025. That increase was far steeper than the rise recorded among people of Dutch origin over the same period.
CBS measured two distinct forms of loneliness in its survey: emotional loneliness, tied to feelings of emptiness, abandonment, or missing specific people, and social loneliness, tied to a lack of a wider circle of contacts. The gap between immigrants and native-born residents showed up in both.
Not a new problem — but a stubborn one
This isn’t the first time CBS data has flagged the issue. A year earlier, the agency reported that around 11 percent of the population felt very lonely in 2023 — already elevated compared with pre-pandemic levels — with immigrants again standing out: almost 20 percent of people born outside the Netherlands described themselves as very lonely, more than double the 9 percent rate among those born in the country. The persistence of that gap across multiple years of data suggests it isn’t a temporary side effect of the pandemic, but something closer to a structural pattern in how newcomers experience life in the Netherlands.
The Dutch government has previously acknowledged loneliness as a public health priority, committing tens of millions of euros toward municipal anti-loneliness initiatives in recent years. But with CBS now showing the immigrant-loneliness gap widening rather than narrowing, pressure is likely to grow on policymakers — and on municipalities, employers, and integration programs — to address why newcomers in particular are struggling to build the social ties that protect against isolation.
Why this keeps mattering
Loneliness in the Netherlands isn’t a single news cycle — it’s an annual data point that reliably resurfaces in policy debates, healthcare planning, and integration discussions throughout the year. With CBS’s 2025 figures now on record and the immigrant gap freshly quantified, expect this data to be cited repeatedly in the weeks ahead, from municipal budget discussions to expat community reporting on quality of life in the Netherlands.
Sources
- NL Times — 1 in 10 adults in the Netherlands feel severely lonely
- NL Times — One in ten Dutch feel very lonely; Still higher than pre-pandemic
- DutchReview — Another crisis: nearly half of all Dutch people feel lonely, study finds
What do you feel about this post?
Like
Love
Happy
Haha
Sad
