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European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), 2003-2023

SN: 0015-01 - 0015-21

ABOUT THE STUDY

The Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) in Ireland is a household survey covering a broad range of issues in relation to income and living conditions.  It is the official source of data on household and individual income and also provides a number of key national poverty indicators, such as the ‘at risk of poverty’ rate, the consistent poverty rate and rates of enforced deprivation.

The primary focus of the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) is the collection of information on the income and living conditions of different types of households in Ireland, in order to derive indicators on poverty, deprivation and social exclusion. It is a voluntary survey of private households.

The SILC Anonymised Microdata File (AMF) contains both personal and household level data. Household data is at present duplicated for each member of the household. If performing household level analysis, please be aware of this and subset the data to include a single entry per household (interview_hh = 1).

Census Revision to SILC 2020-SILC 2022

The annual Survey of Income and Living Condition (SILC) results are weighted using population estimates which are generated on an ongoing basis. Census of Population 2022 results have been used to revise population estimates for 2020 to 2022, and consequently results for SILC survey years 2020, 2021 and 2022 are revised.

For more information see the Information Note: Census Revisions - SILC 2020 to 2022

Revision to SILC 2020
In SILC, weights are applied to the data to ensure the results are reflective of the population as a whole. The survey weights for 2020 SILC results have been adjusted to better reflect the estimated household distribution within the rental sector. While this has not impacted the overall at risk of poverty rate (unchanged at 13.2%), it has resulted in a reduction of the published material deprivation rate (14.3% compared with 15.6%) and the consistent poverty rate (4.7% compared with 5%).
The following is a list of tables and graphs in the SILC 2020 publication where figures have been revised.
Table 1 Main result changes due to revision
Table 2 List of revised tables and graphs
Table 3 List of revised PxStat tables
Published on 06 May 2022

Information Note - Revision to SILC 2020 

Break in the SILC time series for 2020

In 2021 the European legislative basis (Regulation No 1177/2003) for the production of statistics on income and living conditions has been repealed by Regulation 2019/1700. This new framework regulation establishes a common framework for European statistics relating to persons and households, based on data at individual level collected by samples. In order to meet the requirements of the new regulation, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) introduced changes to many SILC business processes. These changes have resulted in a break in the SILC time series for 2020.

Information Note - Break in Time Series SILC 2020

The region coding in the SILC AMF was outdated.
Revised SILC AMF files for 2012-2020 using the updated NUTS2 coding are now available through ISSDA.

Information Note for Data Users: revision to the Irish NUTS 2 and NUTS 3 Regions 

Please note: In 2020 AMF was revised to be more in line with the SILC RMF. Variables were renamed in accordance with Eurostats Doc65, which provides methodological guidelines and description of EU-SILC target variables. The target variables within the AMF are data on household and individual income as well as a number of key national poverty indicators, therefore variables identified as being not relevant to SILC were removed from the AMF. Furthermore, additional statistical disclosure controls were also implemented in the revisions so as to adhere to updates of the Legislation, Governance & Data Policies of the CSO. 

Please note: SILC AMF data is cross-sectional microdata in which household and/or individuals cannot be tracked  over time. The household id variables in each cross sectional file are randomly generated and cannot  be linked between yearly datasets.  

DATA AND DOCUMENTATION

Data (available through ISSDA application process)

Documentation (available for download)

Codebooks

Reports

European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) Modules

Module 2010 Intra Household Finances

SN: 0016-00

Documentation:

Module 2011 Intergenerational Poverty

SN: 0017-00

Documentation:

LINKS

• CSO SILC website
• CSO SILC Releases and Publications

ACCESS INFORMATION

Accessing the data

ISSDA may only supply data to requestors from the EEA and countries with an adequacy decision.

To access the data, please complete a ISSDA Data Request Form for Research Purposes - Pseudonymised Datasets, sign it, and send it to ISSDA by email.

For teaching purposes, please complete the ISSDA Data Request Form for Teaching Purposes - Pseudonymised Datasets, and follow the procedures, as above. This covers sharing of data with students in a classroom situation. Teaching requests are approved on a once-off module/workshop basis. Subsequent occurances of the module/workshop require a new application‌. If students will subsequently using data for projects/assignments they must submit their own request form for Research Purposes. Please contact us if you have any queries.

Data will be disseminated on receipt of a fully completed, signed form. Incomplete or unsigned forms will be returned to the data requester for completion.

‌‌Acknowledgements

Any work based in whole or part on resources provided by the ISSDA, should  acknowledge: “European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC)" and also ISSDA, in the following way: “Accessed via the Irish Social Science Data Archive - www.ucd.ie/issda”.

Citation requirement

The data and its creators shall be cited in all publications and presentations for which the data have been used. The bibliographic citation may be in the form suggested by the archive or in the form required by the publication.

Bibliographical citation

Central Statistics Office. (2024). European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), 2023. [dataset]. 1st Edition. Irish Social Science Data Archive. SN: 0015-21, URL http://www.ucd.ie/issda/eu-silc

Notification

The user shall notify the Irish Social Science Data Archive of all publications where she or he has used the data.

If you have any queries you can read our FAQs.

For a list of Health related datasets click here.

Bibliography

Journal Articles

Collins, M. (2020). Private Pensions and the Gender Distribution of Fiscal Welfare. Social Policy and Society, 19(3), 500-516. doi:10.1017/S1474746420000111

Madden, D. (2010), Ordinal and cardinal measures of health inequality: an empirical comparison. Health Econ., 19: 243–250. doi:10.1002/hec.1472

Madden, D. (2011) Health and income poverty in Ireland, 2003–2006. The Journal of Economic Inequality: Volume 9, Issue 1, pp 23–33 http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1007/s10888-009-9124-5

Madden, D. (2015) Health and Wealth on the Roller-Coaster: Ireland, 2003–2011. Social Indicators Research: Volume 121, Issue 2, pp 387–412. http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1007/s11205-014-0644-4

Madden, David. Winners and Losers on the Roller-Coaster: Ireland, 2003-2011. The Economic and Social Review, Vol. 45, No. 3, Autumn, 2014, pp. 405–421. http://www.esr.ie/article/view/187

Morrissey, K and O'Donoghue, C and Farrell, N. (2014) The Local Impact of the Marine Sector in Ireland: A Spatial Microsimulation Analysis. Spatial Economic Analysis, 9 (1). pp. 31-50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17421772.2013.835439

Murphy, E. C., & Oesch, D. (2018). Is employment polarisation inevitable? Occupational change in Ireland and Switzerland, 1970–2010. Work, employment and society, 32(6), 1099-1117.

Norris, M. and Winston, N. (2012), Home-ownership, housing regimes and income inequalities in Western Europe. International Journal of Social Welfare, 21: 127–138. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2397.2011.00811.x

O'Donoghue, C, Loughery, J and Morrissey, K (2013) Using the EU-SILC to Model the Impact of the Economic Crisis on Inequality. Journal of European Labor Studies, 13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2193-9012-2-23

Working Papers/ Reports/ Policy Briefings

Collins, M.L. and C. Elliott O’Dare (2022), Low Paid Older Workers: a quantitative and qualitative profile of low pay among workers aged over 50. Dublin, UCD and Low Pay Commission. https://assets.gov.ie/240432/dd837fa4-1b09-43c8-976d-f3028cbe791b.pdf

Collins, M. (2020). The Hidden Cost of Poverty: Estimating the Public Service Cost of Poverty in Ireland. https://www.svp.ie/news-media/publications/social-justice-publications/the-hidden-cost-of-poverty.aspx

Lydon R., McIndoe-Calder T. (2017) The Great Irish (De)Leveraging 2005-14. Central Bank of Ireland Research Technichal Paper 05/RT/2017. https://centralbank.ie/docs/default-source/publications/research-technical-papers/05rt17---the-great-irish-deleveraging.pdf?sfvrsn=4

Nugent C., (2017) Wages, labour costs and living standards, NERI Research inBrief https://www.nerinstitute.net/research/wages-labour-costs-and-living-standards/

Books/ Book Chapters

Collins, M.L. and A. Regan (2021). ‘The Political Economy of Income and Wealth Distribution’ in D. Farrell and N. Hardiman (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Financialisation of Irish Homeownership and the Impact of the Global Financial Crisis' in MacLaran, A. and Kelly, S. (eds) (2014) Neoliberal Urban Policy and the Transformation of the City: Reshaping Dublin. London: Palgrave Macmillan