Romanians and Croatians are the most mobile citizens of the European Union – the most likely to move to other EU member states for work reasons.

The EU statistics provider Eurostat says that about a fifth, or 18.6 per cent, of Romanian of work age reside in another EU country, making them the nation with the highest mobility in the EU.

Other national groups with high mobility are Bulgarians, accounting for 10.3 per cent of the residents in the country of their citizenship, followed by Portuguese (10.6 per cent), and Croatians (17.6 per cent).

At the other end of the scale are Germany and Sweden, which both make up for less than one per cent of any EU member states’ residents; a figure that reaches almost three per cent of nine member states.

The overall number of EU mobile citizens has dropped to 3.3 per cent, about 0.9 per less than in 2010.

The largest numbers of national groups of mobile EU citizens aged 20-64 increased individually as 2.3 million people of working age came from Romania, over one million from Italy and Poland each, and 679,600 from Portugal.

In general, data from the last decade shows that Romanians have remained the most mobile nation in the EU. In addition, the number of Croatian mobile citizens has increased by 7.6 per cent, followed by Romanians with 7.1 per cent.

The corresponding share of the mobile Finnish citizens in the total resident population of Finland dropped from 2.2 per cent to 1.5 per cent in 2020, which marks the most noticeable decline in the 27-nation-bloc.

In addition, these figures stood relatively low in other countries, ranging from 0.8 per cent in Germany to 2.8 per cent in Italy, with the exception of Portugal, where the rates stood at 10.6 per cent.

In addition, Italy, Spain and France saw an increase of over 50,000 citizens in the total number. More specifically, more Italian citizens moved to other EU countries – accounting for 235,000 more residents, followed by Spanish citizens that increased by 123,000 and French by 58,800 citizens.

The employment rate of mobile EU citizens was reported at 73.1 per cent in 2020, compared to an EU average of 72.4 per cent.

Employment rates in Bulgaria, Czechia, Romania, Estonia, the Netherlands, Germany, Latvia and Sweden are higher in the countries of citizenship than for the mobile citizens, with a difference of between 11.6 to 0.3 percentage points.