Trends in household overcrowding by tenure

Overcrowding matters for health in several ways. It has been linked to psychological distress and worse mental health, resulting from having less privacy and the risk of increased conflict in a household. It can also be linked to the spread of infectious diseases. Several factors can lead to overcrowding, such as scarce or unaffordable housing, and demographic characteristics, such as age.

This chart shows the proportion of households that are classified as overcrowded by housing tenure over time in England.

• In 2023/24, 8.9% of households in the social rented sector were overcrowded, compared with 5.8% of private rented households, and 1.0% of owner-occupied households. Overall, 3% of households in England were overcrowded in 2023/24, which amounts to over 800,000 households.
• Overcrowding in private rented and social rented tenures peaked in 2019/20 before the COVID-19 pandemic, following a rapid increase since 2016/17.
• Overcrowding in the social rented sector continued to increase after a low following the first year of the pandemic. It is 2.7 percentage points higher than the post-financial crisis low in 2013/14.
• Overcrowding in the private rented sector increased for the first time since 2019/20 and now stands at 5.8% of households. In contrast, overcrowding in owner-occupied homes has fallen steadily over the past two decades, from almost 1.8% in 1995/96 to 1.0% in 2023/24, and was largely unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

There have been a few changes to household composition since 2019/20. These include an increase in single-person households, and a related decrease in the overall average number of people per household, a reduction in households with children, and temporary moves in and out of households. These changes could have affected rates of overcrowding and may also partly relate to changes in living arrangements since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, although we cannot rule out an impact from changes to data collection. 

Policy intervention over the past decade helps to explain differing trends across tenures. Policy in the social rented sector has also sought to discourage under-occupation. The under-occupation penalty or ‘bedroom tax’ reduces housing benefit for people living in homes that are under-occupied, relative to their assessed bedroom requirements. This has led to fairly small improvements in overcrowding relative to the number of overcrowded households in the sector and the financial penalties for people who are unable to downsize. On the other hand, there have been concerns that cuts to housing benefit for people in the private rented sector played a role in increasing overcrowding.