Who receives energy social bonuses: an analysis by income level and family type

• Only 8.3% of households receive any energy social bonus, even though 14.3% reported having problems keeping their home at an adequate temperature in 2021, the latest available data.
• This percentage only rises to 17% among the third of households with the lowest income, and falls rapidly as we look at middle- and upper-middle-class households, covering barely 1 in 50 families, but picks up again at the top: 1 in 25 families among the country’s top 2% earners has an energy social bonus of some kind.
• Only 1 in 3 large-family households among the country’s lowest-earning 20% has an energy bonus. But for the middle and upper-middle class this proportion soars to more than half, which suggests that families with more time and information to obtain this type of bonus are more likely to get them.

All of the above shows that energy bonuses have insufficient coverage, which is especially serious for structurally vulnerable families. We recommend:

• Considerably reducing the barriers to applying for and obtaining these bonuses, taking the initiative by offering a pre-filled application to those who meet the conditions, or even moving to an automatic award system that could work through the energy bill or as a component of the Minimum Living Income or another unified mechanism, avoiding fragmentation and bringing together, as far as possible, all the instruments to fight poverty and its associated risks.
• Better combining income criteria with household type criteria, but with the necessary care not to exclude too many households: a threshold of €26,000 such as the one that has been under discussion would remove the aid from 1 in 3 lower-middle-income large families.