A total 3.5% of people in Malta lived in overcrowded household in 2015, according to the latest official figures released.
According to a National Statistics Office survey on income and living conditions 44% of households in Malta and Gozo in 2015 lived in houses. The remaining share lived mostly in apartments or maisonettes. The largest proportion of dwellings - 31.1%, contained five rooms. This was followed by 23% composed of six rooms, and 19.4% of seven or more rooms.
Home ownership was the most common type of tenure status, with 76.5 per cent of all households owning their main dwelling. Of these, more than three fourths were outright owners, meaning they either never had a mortgage or have repaid their debt.
When considering households with dependent children, the share of home owners (85.7 per cent) was higher than that for households without dependent children (71.5 per cent). However the trend is reversed for rented main dwellings with 22.6 per cent of households without dependent children being tenants as against 9.8 per cent of households with dependent children.
In 2015, 3.5 per cent of all persons living in private households lived in overcrowded households.
The overcrowding rate is defined by the number of rooms available to the household in relation to the its size and other demographics. In owned households the overcrowding rate stood at 2.5 per cent, whereas the corresponding rate for persons living in rented dwellings was 9.5 per cent.
The overcrowding rate can also be observed to be linked to relative poverty. This was because for persons who were at-risk-of-poverty or social exclusion, the overcrowding rate stood at 8.2 per cent whereas this rate stood at 2.2 per cent for the rest of the population.
Moreover, rates of monetary poverty and material deprivation turned out to be significantly higher for persons living in overcrowded households, when compared to the rest of the target population.
While the overall at-risk-of-poverty or social exclusion rate stood at 22.4 per cent, it more than doubled to 52.2 per cent when only considering persons living in overcrowded households.
The average monthly housing cost in 2015 was estimated at €141.
Households with an annual disposable income of €10,000 or less spent an average of €85 a month to cover housing costs, while households at the other end of the income spectrum, earning more than €30,000, spent €196 per month.
Overall, housing costs were perceived to be somewhat of a burden by 55 per cent of all persons living in households. A further 34 per cent considered these costs to be a heavy burden, while for the remaining 11 per cent they were of no burden at all.