The proportion of young people (aged 18-24) leaving education and training early in the European Union fell to 9.1% last year, bringing the bloc close to achieving its 2030 target of reducing the rate below 9.0%, according to Eurostat.
As the statistics body noted, the share of early school leavers has shown a steady decline in recent years – a decade ago, the figure stood at 11.0%.
As Eurostat noted, early school leaving remains more common among young men than young women. In 2025, 10.6% of young men left education and training early, compared with 7.5% of young women. Both groups have recorded improvements over the past decade, with the gap between male and female rates remaining consistent.
Country by country
On a country-by-country basis, 19 EU member states reported lower levels of early school leaving in 2025 than they did in 2015. Malta recorded the largest reduction, with its rate falling by 7.7 percentage points over the ten-year period. Portugal and Spain also achieved substantial declines, with reductions of 7.4 and 7.2 percentage points respectively.
At the same time, seven member states reported higher rates of early school leaving than a decade earlier. Cyprus recorded the largest increase, followed by Germany and Austria.
Seventeen EU countries have already achieved the EU-wide target level of below 9%. Croatia recorded the lowest rate of early school leaving in 2025 at 2.1%, followed by Greece (3.0%), and Ireland (3.6%).
At the other end of the scale, Romania reported the highest share of early leavers at 15.5%, followed by Germany (13.1%), and Spain (12.8%).
‘The indicator ‘early leavers from education and training’ is defined as the percentage of the population aged 18-24 with at most a lower secondary education and not in further (formal or non-formal) education or training during the 4 weeks preceding the survey,’ Eurostat noted. Read more here.
