Energy poverty is often associated with winter and the inability to keep homes adequately warm. However, as temperatures rise and heatwaves become more frequent and intense, maintaining safe and comfortable indoor conditions during summer is becoming increasingly important for individual well-being and overall health and safety.
A new Energy Poverty Advisory Hub (EPAH) report explores these connections as part of a broader effort to strengthen energy poverty measurement and understanding in the EU. Building on previous EPAH reports from 2022 and 2024, it updates existing indicators, introduces new dimensions related to climate, health, and mobility, and analyses how these interact across Member States.
The findings underline the growing relevance of summer energy poverty, not only in Southern Europe but also in countries with traditionally colder or milder climates.
Expanding energy poverty measurement
Tackling energy poverty requires a deep and continuously evolving understanding of its causes, manifestations, and interactions with wider social and environmental conditions. Accurate diagnosis is crucial for designing effective policy responses. Yet translating the complexity of energy poverty into measurable indicators remains a persistent challenge.
Current energy poverty assessments focus primarily on energy expenditure, building conditions, and household income. However, growing evidence highlights the importance of additional factors related to transport, climate, and health. Transport poverty, defined as limited access to affordable, efficient mobility, can increase a household’s overall energy burden. At the same time, the growing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events disproportionately affect vulnerable and low-income households, while exposure to extreme heat and cold is associated with adverse health outcomes and excess mortality.
To reflect this multidimensional reality, EPAH has updated five existing indicators and introduced nine new ones, as outlined in the report.
New data sources were integrated to address the persistent challenge of unavailable or outdated information in several countries. For some, additional disaggregation options were included, allowing results to be analysed by factors such as heating system type, age, sex, risk of poverty or social exclusion, degree of urbanisation, household composition, and disability status. In some cases, definitions were also reframed to focus more directly on populations experiencing vulnerability. For example, “Population living in dwellings comfortably warm in wintertime” was reformulated as “Population living in a dwelling not comfortably warm during winter.”
The nine new indicators cover summer excess mortality, cold- and heat-stress days, recent energy-efficiency improvements in dwellings, at-risk-of-poverty rates, material deprivation, car ownership, transport expenditure, affordability of personal cars, and public transport use. The new poverty and material deprivation indicators further strengthen the socioeconomic dimension of the framework, while the transport indicators capture the additional energy burden associated with mobility. This is particularly relevant in rural, peripheral, and poorly connected areas, where access to essential services may depend on private vehicles, and limited public transport options can create additional vulnerabilities.
The revised indicators have been incorporated into the Energy Poverty Indicators Dashboard (pictured left), and the accompanying indicator leaflets have been updated to reflect the latest definitions, data sources, methodologies, and results.
Alongside the indicator updates, the report explores how climate exposure, housing conditions, poverty, and health outcomes interact across different European contexts. Covering eight indicators across 17 Member States1, the analysis examines trends from 2015 to 2024, identifies relationships among indicators, and groups countries by shared climate and vulnerability characteristics. The results show that energy poverty is shaped by different combinations of thermal exposure, housing quality, socioeconomic conditions, and health risks. While broad differences emerge between Northern and Southern European countries, the report also shows that vulnerability varies significantly between national contexts.
Summer energy poverty: heat, housing and health
The report highlights several ways in which extreme heat can interact with existing energy poverty vulnerabilities.
Households experiencing energy poverty can be particularly vulnerable to extreme heat. Poor housing conditions, limited access to cooling equipment, and difficulty covering additional energy costs can make it harder to maintain adequate indoor temperatures. Extreme heat also poses health risks, especially for older people, people with pre-existing health conditions, and those experiencing socioeconomic vulnerability. The newly included indicators on heat-stress days and summer excess mortality help capture these links more effectively.
The cross-analysis also provides evidence of links between heat exposure and other vulnerabilities. Twelve of the 17 Member States analysed showed an increasing trend in heat-stress days. Heat stress was also strongly correlated with poor housing conditions and moderately correlated with utility bill arrears and the at-risk-of-poverty rate. At the same time, the report stresses that these correlations do not establish direct causality. Heat exposure alone does not determine energy poverty. Housing quality, household income, access to cooling, health conditions, and local infrastructure all influence how high temperatures affect households.
The findings also show why summer energy poverty is not limited to Southern Europe. While countries such as Cyprus, Greece, and Spain experience high heat exposure, elevated summer excess mortality has also been observed in countries with traditionally colder climates. Buildings and infrastructure designed primarily for winter conditions may be less prepared for increasingly hot summers.
Overall, the report identifies important gaps in the current EU data landscape, offering recommendations to improve the scope and depth of energy poverty assessment. In fact, only a limited number of relevant datasets are available at the NUTS II or NUTS III level, corresponding to basic and small regions, respectively. Several key indicators are also not collected annually, making it more difficult to monitor trends over time and assess the effectiveness of policy interventions. Data on summer energy poverty are particularly fragmented, including information on indoor thermal discomfort, access to cooling equipment, and summer excess mortality. Closing these gaps will be essential to enable more accurate, timely, and locally appropriate policy responses.
The report therefore calls for greater investment in consistent annual and regional data collection, stronger cooperation between statistical authorities, local governments, research centres, and observatories. It also recommends greater seasonal disaggregation of indicators such as utility arrears and household expenditure to better understand differences between winter and summer energy poverty. Over time, indicators addressing summer energy poverty should reach a level of breadth, frequency, and national coverage comparable to that of their winter counterparts.
Towards a year-round understanding of energy poverty
The updated EPAH indicators, corresponding dashboard, and leaflets mark an important step towards a more comprehensive framework for diagnosing and monitoring energy poverty.
The report reinforces the need to understand energy poverty through the interaction of income, housing, energy expenditure, mobility, climate exposure, and health, rather than through individual indicators in isolation. The growing relevance of summer energy poverty makes this broader approach increasingly important. As temperatures rise, energy poverty is not only about whether households can keep warm in winter, but also about whether they can maintain safe and comfortable living conditions in summer.
By continuing to evolve in response to climate, social, and policy developments, the EPAH framework can better support Member States, local authorities, and Covenant of Mayors signatories in designing energy poverty mitigation strategies that are equitable, effective, and responsive to local contexts.
1Only 17 Member States were included in the analysis due to data availability.
Details
- Publication date
- 25 August 2026