Poland’s Hidden Energy Poor: Why Falling Energy Bills Don’t Mean Rising Comfort

Energy poverty is often measured by a simple yardstick: the share of a household’s budget swallowed by energy bills. By that measure, Poland looks like a success story. New research analyzing two decades of nationally representative data shows that the share of household income spent on energy fell from 9.5 percent in 2004 to 6.3 percent in 2024, a statistically significant decline of roughly 0.19 percentage points per year. Yet the same study, published in Frontiers in Environmental Science, warns that this seemingly encouraging trend conceals a far more troubling picture of deprivation hiding behind the numbers.

The study, conducted by Marlena Jolanta Piekut of Warsaw University of Technology, draws on the Polish Household Budget Survey compiled by Statistics Poland, combining annual aggregated statistics spanning 2004 through 2024 with detailed household-level microdata covering more than 28,000 households in each of 2023 and 2024. Poland is a particularly revealing case: Eurostat data show Polish households devote one of the highest shares of total spending to energy in the European Union, at 7.6 percent, reflecting both the country’s aging housing stock and its continued reliance on coal and other solid fuels for heating.

The technical core of the analysis rests on three complementary methods. Trend analysis and income elasticity calculations tracked how the energy burden evolved over twenty years, revealing that elasticity exceeded one during two crisis periods, 2008 to 2011 and 2021 to 2022, peaking at 1.77. In those windows, energy spending grew faster than income, meaning households could not easily cut back on an essential good. During calmer years, elasticity hovered near zero or turned negative, consistent with energy behaving as a necessity whose relative budgetary weight shrinks as incomes rise.

Cluster analysis of the microdata then sorted households into distinct consumption profiles. Two dominant groups emerged in both survey years: an electricity-and-gas profile covering roughly 52 to 58 percent of households, skewed toward rural areas, lower incomes, and lower educational attainment, and a district-heating profile covering about 42 percent, concentrated in cities among wealthier, better-educated households. In 2023 only, a small third cluster appeared, comprising 6 percent of households whose energy spending was 83.8 percent solid fuel, overwhelmingly coal and firewood, and these households were poorer, more rural, and less educated than the rest.

The most consequential methodological move was the construction of a multidimensional Energy Poverty Index combining four binary dimensions: an energy cost burden exceeding 10 percent of disposable income, low household income, inability to keep the home adequately warm, and arrears on energy bills. Households meeting at least two criteria were classified as energy poor. The results were striking: 11.4 percent of Polish households met the multidimensional definition, while nearly 30 percent more exhibited a single symptom, placing them at elevated risk. In total, more than 40 percent of households showed at least one manifestation of energy vulnerability.

Logistic regression identified the structural drivers behind this risk. Reliance on non-labor income nearly doubled the odds of multidimensional energy poverty, with an odds ratio of 1.78, and heating with a solid-fuel stove increased the odds by 43 percent. Education showed a steep protective gradient: relative to households whose head had at most lower-secondary schooling, basic vocational education cut the odds to 0.65, secondary education to 0.39, and higher education to 0.27. Household composition mattered sharply as well, with single mothers facing roughly double the odds and couples with four or more children about 2.1 times the odds of the reference group.

Disposable income declined monotonically with energy poverty severity, from an average of 4,359 zloty per capita among households with no symptoms to 2,718 zloty for those with one and just 1,588 zloty for the multidimensionally poor. The at-risk group sat closer to the energy-poor than to the secure on nearly every characteristic, sharing the same risk factors, including solid-fuel heating and dependence on non-labor income, which the author argues makes them a priority target for preventive intervention before deprivations accumulate.

A leave-one-dimension-out sensitivity analysis tested whether these findings were artifacts of the index’s construction. Each of the four dimensions was excluded in turn and the regression re-estimated. The core predictors, employment status, education, household composition, and marital status, remained stable in direction and magnitude across all four specifications, with model fit actually improving in some cases, indicating that no single dimension was disproportionately driving the conclusions.

Perhaps the study’s most important warning concerns interpretation. A declining expenditure share, the author cautions, should not be read as improving welfare. Energy-poor households may respond to rising costs not by spending more but by underheating their homes and forgoing essential energy services, so a low energy share can signal unmet needs rather than comfort. Expenditure-based indicators, including the single income-cost measure adopted in Poland’s draft Social Climate Plan, systematically underestimate the problem by overlooking material deprivation and housing conditions.

The policy implications point toward integration rather than any single lever. Translating the odds ratios into population effects, the study estimates that shifting all solid-fuel households to alternative heating would reduce multidimensional energy poverty prevalence by only about 0.4 percentage points, and no single-factor intervention exceeds roughly 0.6 points. Meaningful reduction, the analysis concludes, requires coordinated action combining targeted social protection with investments in residential energy efficiency, housing modernization, low-carbon heating, and labor-market activation, so that the energy transition does not deepen the inequalities it is meant to resolve.

Subject of Research: Multidimensional energy poverty and household energy expenditure patterns in Poland

Article Title: Household energy expenditures and multidimensional energy poverty in Poland: patterns, determinants, and policy implications

Article References: Piekut, M. J. (2026). Household energy expenditures and multidimensional energy poverty in Poland: patterns, determinants, and policy implications. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 14, Article 1950882. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1950882

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1950882

Keywords: energy poverty, Poland, household energy expenditure, multidimensional index, logistic regression, cluster analysis, solid-fuel heating, energy affordability, Household Budget Survey, energy transition, thermal deprivation, social policy