Clarifying NSO statistics concerning home ownership and rentals

On 13 October, Times of Malta published an article quoting data on tenure status from the EU SILC survey as published by the NSO in news release 182/2025.

Apart from the data published in this news release, the article quoted similar estimates for other reference years published in previous news releases available on the NSO’s website.

While the data quoted in the article is correct, the estimates for 2024 cannot be compared to data for reference years prior to 2023 due to a break in time series, caused by a methodological change making some of the indicators from EU-SILC 2023 and EU-SILC 2024 no longer fully comparable with previous years.

The break in time series was required following the most recent Census of Population and Housing, which was conducted in 2021. Before the 2021 Census, it was not possible to calibrate the EU-SILC data using separate weights for the Maltese and foreign populations; therefore, calibration was done using total population weights.

When comparing the distribution by broad citizenship category of the EU-SILC weighted counts to the Census figures, an under-coverage of the foreign population was observed. After the 2021 Census data became available, it became possible to apply separate calibration weights for the Maltese and foreign populations, starting from reference year 2023.

While this ensured that the distribution by broad citizenship category aligned with the Census, it led to a reduction in the share of Maltese and an increase in the share of foreigners.

This methodological change caused the break in time series in 2023. Further technical details regarding the break in time series will be made available in the coming days through a technical note which will be published on the NSO’s website.

While this methodological change and the break in time series were reported at the time the 2023 data was published in news release 188/2024; we recognise that this break in series should have also been flagged in all subsequent publications reporting outputs that were affected by the break in series. 

To address this, the NSO is revising all relevant news releases so that all tables are flagged with a ‘b’ – break in series – where applicable – and the methodological notes will be updated to contain the relevant details explaining the break in series.

The NSO acknowledges that this break in time series could have been communicated more effectively, and regrets any inconvenience caused to its users.

Etienne Caruana.

Etienne Caruana is Director General of the National Statistics Office.