EU countries ranked by PM2.5 (2024)

Research question: which European countries had the highest and lowest fine-particulate-matter exposure in 2024, and how does each compare to the WHO 2021 guideline of 5 µg/m³ and the current EU limit of 10 µg/m³?

Findings

Across the 28 European countries covered (EU-27 plus the United Kingdom), the highest population-weighted PM2.5 annual mean in 2024 was in Bulgaria at 19.8 µg/m³, followed by Poland (18.4 µg/m³) and Romania (17.6 µg/m³). The lowest exposure was in Sweden (5.4 µg/m³), followed by Finland (5.8 µg/m³) and Estonia (6.4 µg/m³). The cross-country arithmetic mean was 12.46 µg/m³ — well above the WHO 2021 guideline. Cumulative premature deaths attributable to PM2.5 across the 28 countries totalled approximately 370,000.

The geographic pattern is consistent with the long-established "north-clean, south-and-east-polluted" gradient: Nordic and Atlantic-fringe countries dominate the low end (low population density, dominant westerly winds, near-elimination of coal-based residential heating); the highest end is dominated by countries where residential solid-fuel heating (Bulgaria, Poland, Romania) or basin topography (the Po Valley in Italy) traps emissions.

Ranking

Rank Country PM2.5 (µg/m³) × WHO 2021 NO2 (µg/m³) Stations Deaths (PM2.5)
1 Bulgaria 19.8 4.0× 21.6 1 13,800
2 Poland 18.4 3.7× 22.8 2 41,800
3 Romania 17.6 3.5× 22.4 1 27,500
4 Cyprus 16.9 3.4× 17.8 1 700
5 Hungary 16.8 3.4× 22.6 1 9,800
6 Croatia 16.4 3.3× 19.2 1 5,100
7 Italy 16.3 3.3× 23.8 3 52,300
8 Slovakia 15.6 3.1× 19.6 1 5,300
9 Czech Republic 15.2 3.0× 20.5 1 8,600
10 Greece 14.7 2.9× 22.1 1 11,700
11 Slovenia 13.4 2.7× 17.8 1 1,800
12 Malta 12.8 2.6× 18.4 1 400
13 Belgium 12.2 2.4× 22.3 1 7,300
14 Netherlands 11.8 2.4× 21.7 2 8,600
15 Austria 11.5 2.3× 18.9 1 4,900
16 France 11.4 2.3× 20.6 3 40,500
17 Latvia 11.4 2.3× 13.6 1 1,700
18 Germany 11.2 2.2× 19.4 3 54,400
19 Lithuania 10.8 2.2× 14.2 1 2,400
20 Luxembourg 10.6 2.1× 19.8 1 300
21 Spain 10.2 2.0× 18.9 2 24,700
22 United Kingdom 9.8 2.0× 21.4 3 30,400
23 Portugal 9.4 1.9× 18.6 1 6,100
24 Denmark 9.1 1.8× 16.8 1 3,400
25 Ireland 7.9 1.6× 14.8 1 1,300
26 Estonia 6.4 1.3× 11.2 1 600
27 Finland 5.8 1.2× 13.5 1 1,500
28 Sweden 5.4 1.1× 12.4 1 2,900

Methodology

The ranking above was computed by querying the countries table in the PlainAirQuality SQLite database for the column pm25_annual_avg, which holds the EEA-published population-weighted annual mean PM2.5 concentration for the most recently validated year (2024). The query returns one row per country sorted descending by PM2.5. Sister columns retrieved for context: no2_annual_avg, station_count, and premature_deaths_pm25_2023 (EEA HRAPIE methodology applied to WHO 2021 concentration-response functions).

Population weighting is computed by the EEA using a 1 km gridded population overlay (Global Human Settlement Layer Population, GHS-POP) and CAMS reanalysis 0.1° gridded PM2.5 fields. The metric represents the concentration to which the average European in each country is exposed at their residential address — not a simple arithmetic mean across stations, which would over-weight rural background sites.

See our methodology page for details on EEA Dataflow E1a, EU reference measurement methods, aggregation rules, and known data limitations (data capture thresholds, source-attribution caveats, real-time vs validated data).

Limitations

Country-level ranking masks within-country variation. The PM2.5 annual mean in central Madrid differs substantially from that in coastal Galicia even though both contribute to the Spain figure. The EEA population-weighted metric we use is the appropriate national-level summary, but for individual exposure assessment the relevant figure is the nearest representative station to the residential address — see country-detail pages for station-level data. The ranking also reflects a single year (2024); inter-annual variability driven by wildfire seasons (notably the 2017, 2021, 2022, 2023 Mediterranean seasons), Saharan dust intrusions, and weather patterns can shift a country by 1–3 µg/m³ year on year.

Source

Underlying data: European Environment Agency, Air Quality e-Reporting Database (Dataflow E1a), validated 2024 dataset, published September 2025. Mortality estimates: EEA HRAPIE methodology, see EEA in-depth air pollution topic page.