Is there anyone you could ask for help?

Do you have any relatives, friends or neighbours who are not your household members that you can ask for help? This means any kind of help: moral, material or financial.

The question does not ask whether you have ever asked for help. It asks only whether someone exists. And it leaves out the people you live with: a spouse, a child, a parent in the same house does not count. Only people outside the household count.

In Romania, 293 people in 1,000 said no. The European Union average is 112. In Norway, 24.

The survey is run in the same year, with the same question and the same definition, across the Union and in six countries outside it. The bar shows how many people in 1,000 said no in 2022; the point shows where the country stood in 2013, the first wave of this module.

Second is Germany, at 202 in 1,000. The gap between it and Romania is 9.1 percentage points — about the distance between Germany and the Union average.

The rise is not Romania's alone. The Union average went from 66 to 112 in 1,000 over nine years, and Germany from 39 to 202. Bulgaria, meanwhile, rose to 180 in 2018 and fell back to 46 in 2022, which shows how much an answer like this can vary between waves. That is why the argument rests on the 2022 figure, when every country answered the same question in the same year.

The same interview also asks people to rate their trust in others from 0 to 10. Romania gave 7.1, the highest average among the 26 Union countries with a 2022 figure. It has stayed there: 7.5 in 2025, against 5.8 for the Union.

Both answers come from the same people, in the same visit. The country that rates trust highest also has the largest share of people with nobody to ask.

Across the 26 Union countries with both figures in 2022, the trust rating tells you nothing about whether people have someone to ask. The correlation coefficient is 0.28: if there were no relationship at all, a correlation at least that strong would arise by chance in 17 cases out of 100. It is too weak to mean anything, and its sign is positive, which is the opposite of what we would expect.

A third measurement matches neither of the first two. The World Values Survey offers a choice between “most people can be trusted” and “you need to be very careful in dealing with people”, and in the 2017–2022 wave 12.1% of Romanians chose the first. That is among the lowest shares in Europe. One idea, three instruments, three results that do not agree.

If missing support were one group's problem, the differences between groups would be large. They are not. Romania's richest fifth, at 228 in 1,000, is worse off than the Union's poorest fifth, at 159.

The largest differences are between age groups. At 16–24, 191 in 1,000 say no; at 65–74, 345. In the Union the figures for those two age groups are 89 and 122, much closer together.

The same survey also measures help given, under the name informal voluntary activity: unpaid help offered to people outside the household in the past twelve months. In Romania, 4.2%. The Union average is 13.8%; it is 73.9% in the Netherlands and 79.8% in Norway.

The distance between 2.4% in Bulgaria and 79.8% in Norway is more than thirtyfold. No real behaviour varies that much between European countries; what varies is what the word is taken to mean. Where “voluntary” suggests an organisation, the figure comes out small; where it covers any hand given to a neighbour, it comes out large. The figure supports the claim that Romania is at the low end of the ranking, and nothing finer than that.

For the same reason the two figures track each other only weakly across the Union: the correlation between the share with nobody to ask and the share who helped is −0.33. Bulgaria records 2.4% for informal voluntary activity and only 46 in 1,000 without support.

Volunteering through an organisation is below the Union average too: 3.9% in Romania, against 12.3% for the Union.

It does not say people are alone. Asked whether they feel left out of society, 6.6% of people in Romania say yes, below the Union's 7.3%. And 22.9% see relatives every day, another 29.4% every week — against 5.1% daily in the Netherlands and 2.5% in Denmark. People have company. What they do not have is someone to ask for help.

It does not count the people in the house. The question excludes them by design. Romanian households have 2.5 people on average against 2.3 in the Union, which puts Romania 9th of 27. Part of the difference comes from there, but not the 18.1 points that separate Romania from the Union average.

It is not a count of friends. It is what people answer when an interviewer asks them, once every few years, in their own home.

The method changed partway through the series. Since 2021 the survey has followed the European regulation that changed its sampling and its data collection. Eurostat records no break in series for this indicator, in any wave or any country, though the trust series has a break in 2018 for Romania. The comparison the argument rests on is the 2022 one, between countries, in the same year.

A few figures carry quality marks. Of the 26 trust ratings for 2022, five are marked by Eurostat as carrying a break in series or low reliability: France, Hungary, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal. They stay in the chart and in the correlation. The Union averages for help given and for feeling left out are Eurostat estimates rather than collected values. None of the Romanian figures used on this page carries a mark.

• Who has someone to ask for help. Eurostat, ilc_pw06 and ilc_pw07, the personal well-being module of the survey on income and living conditions (EU-SILC), waves 2013, 2018 and 2022. People aged 16 and over.
• Trust in others. Eurostat, ilc_pw03, average rating from 0 to 10, same survey.
• Help given and volunteering. Eurostat, ilc_scp19, social and cultural participation module, 2022 wave: informal and formal voluntary activities.
• Meeting relatives. Eurostat, ilc_scp09, 2022 wave.
• Feeling left out. Eurostat, ilc_pw10, 2022 wave.
• Household size. Eurostat, ilc_lvph01, 2022.
• The question wording. The variable definition in the EU-SILC methodological guidelines, reproduced by Ireland's Central Statistics Office in its 2023 background notes.
• The third measurement of trust. World Values Survey and European Values Study, 2017–2022 wave, integrated series published by Our World in Data: 12.1% for Romania.

The figures were retrieved from the Eurostat database on 10 September 2026.