European Union (27)

EU-27 is the bloc of 27 member states as constituted since the United Kingdom’s withdrawal on 31 January 2020. The label appears across Eurostat datasets as the canonical area for cross-country aggregation from that date onward; pre-2020 time series often use EU-28 for the same indicator before Brexit, and EU-27 (2007–2013) for the bloc as it stood between the 2007 Bulgarian / Romanian enlargement and the 2013 Croatian accession.

Together the member states account for 450.6M people and a combined GDP of ~€18T at current prices, making the EU-27 the world’s third-largest economy by nominal GDP after the United States and China.

Twenty member states form the euro area and share the European Central Bank as their monetary authority. The other seven — Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden — retain national currencies; Denmark holds a treaty opt-out, Sweden has declined to enter ERM II, and the remaining five are formally committed to euro adoption once the convergence criteria are met. Twenty-five of the 27 are full Schengen partners; Cyprus and Ireland remain outside the common travel area.

For most indicators Eurostat publishes the EU-27 aggregate alongside the national series. The method depends on the indicator: monetary flows (GDP, government expenditure, trade) are summed; rates and ratios (unemployment, fertility, life expectancy) are population- or labour-force-weighted averages of the member-state values; demographic stocks are summed for totals and weighted for averages such as median age.

Where a member state has not yet reported for a reference year, the aggregate is flagged as a Eurostat estimate. Users comparing the EU-27 total against earlier years should check whether the historical series uses EU-28 (pre-Brexit) or EU-27 (2020-) — Eurostat aligns most back-series to the 2020 composition for continuity, but some legacy tables retain the original-composition figure.

Full methodology notes for the indicators on this page are linked from each indicator profile and from our methodology overview.