Almost half of people living alone did not own a car in 2020

In 2020, Belgian households had on average 1.07 cars, which is the same as in 2017

The municipality with the lowest average number of cars per household is Saint-Josse-ten-Noode with 0.34 cars per household, while this figure is 1.69 cars per household in the municipality of Lasne. Throughout Belgium, households living in urban municipalities such as Brussels, Liège and Antwerp have on average fewer vehicles than households living in more peripheral municipalities such as Nandrin, Chaumont-Gistoux or Schilde.

In the Brussels-Capital Region, households only had 0.58 cars in 2020, while in the province of Walloon Brabant, they had on average 1.3 cars.

Average number of vehicles per household, provinces and regions in 2020

In 2020, 49.7% of people living alone did not own a car, and 47.0% had only one.

For couples without children living in the same household, 12.6% do not have a car at their disposal and 57.3% have only one. These figures decrease to 9.6% and 36.9% respectively for couples living with at least one child. On the other hand, the share of couples having 3 cars or more goes from 4.5% for couples without children living in the same household to 14.1% for couples with children in the same the household.

This contrasts with the 3.7% of single-parent families who have three or more vehicles. However, 30.0% of them do not have any vehicle at all, and 50.4% have only one car.

Methodology

In order to identify households with vehicles registered in Belgium, we performed a double coupling. The first couples the annual population files with the vehicle fleet files (DIV). This makes it possible to identify cars registered in the name of a natural person (4,679,213 in 2020). The second couples the annual population files with the tax data files (Belcotax). This makes it possible to count the number of company cars (654,956 in 2020). Both groups of cars are taken into account when calculating the statistics on household car ownership.

This double coupling is necessary because it is currently not possible to identify company cars in the vehicle fleet administrative data (DIV). Indeed, these cars are registered in the name of an enterprise without information on the type of use of the vehicle. Thus, it is not possible to distinguish them from, for example, fleets or rental cars. However, the number of company cars can be calculated based on tax returns^[1]. This double-coupling methodology, developed for the 2019 figures, has successfully passed several internal (by comparison with our surveys) and external (by consulting experts) validation exercises. Based on the 2019 figures, the external experts suggested an underestimation of around 150,000 company cars^[2]. This represents a potential error of about 3% on the total number of coupled vehicles (5,311,000 in 2019). We continue to work on improving the quality of this statistic by refining our methodology and assessing the potential of additional administrative sources.

^[1] The declaration of a vehicle can be made for self-employed company directors by declaring the ‘benefit in kind due to the use of a company car’ in tax sheet 281.20, and for employees by declaring the ‘benefit in kind due to the use of a company car’ in tax sheet 281.10.

^[2] According to experts, the underestimation of the number of company cars is not due to individual citizens not declaring them since, in practice, declarations are often prepared by personnel services and social bureaus.