More Dutch adults are single or living apart, says CBS

The amount of people in the Netherlands who are single is rising, and a growing number are in relationships with a partner they do not live with, new figures from statistics agency CBS show.

In 2025, 30% of adults said they had no long-term partner, up from 27% in 2013. A further 10% were in a so-called “living apart together” relationship – a couple who keep separate homes – compared with 8% in 2013. The remaining 60% lived with a partner.

At the start of 2025, 5.7 million adults did not live with a partner. Most of them, 4.4 million, were living alone, while 627,000 were single parents and others still lived with their own parents.

Single women happier
Single women were more likely to call themselves happy (82%) than single men (76%), the agency found. People in couples were happier still: 92% of those living with a partner said they were happy, whether married or not.

Women were slightly more likely to be single overall (32%) than men (28%). Among the under-25s, most were single (62%) or living apart from a partner (29%), and just 8% shared a home with one.

The pattern shifts with age. From 45 onwards single women outnumber single men, an effect CBS links partly to divorce, after which men more often find a new partner. Among divorced women, 68% were single, against 55% of divorced men.

By 75 and over, about 42% of people lived alone with no partner, mostly because a partner had died. Just over half were still living with someone.