If the wage gap is this big, why doesn't everyone just move ?
Our latest episode laid out a stark number : an hour of work is worth roughly three times more in Luxembourg than in Greece. Same Union, same rules, same currency in most cases. It's the kind of gap that raises an obvious follow-up question, one we didn't have room for on air : if moving is legal, free and has been a guaranteed right since the Treaty of Rome, why isn't everyone doing it ?
The answer turns out to be its own small lesson in Inequity because the freedom to move for better pay isn't distributed any more evenly than the pay itself.
The number that should surprise you
According to the European Commission's 2025 Annual Report on Intra-EU Labour Mobility, published in April 2026, only 10.1 million working-age EU citizens - about 3,9 % of the Union's working-age population - currently live in a member state other than the one they hold citizenship in. Given that free movement is one of the EU's four founding freedoms, and given the wage gaps we just spent an episode documenting, that number is remarkably small.
Economists studying the question have reached a fairly consistent conclusion : income difference genuinely is the strongest driver of the mobility that does happen : people do move from lower-GDP countries toward higher-income ones. But the overall volume of movement stays low regardless, because income isn't the only variable in the question.
What actually stops people from moving
The most frequently cited barrier, across multiple Commission surveys, isn't bureaucratic. It's language and culture. Moving your labour six hundred kilometres north for triple the hourly wage is a very different proposition if you also have to learn a new language well enough to work in it, rebuild a social network from zero and navigate an unfamiliar bureaucracy, healthcare system and school system for your children.
There's a second, quieter cost that shows up in the data rather than in any survey : EU citizens who do move face a higher risk of poverty and social exclusion than both nationals and non-EU residents in their host country, even though they tend to have higher employment and activity rates. Moving for a better wage, in other words, doesn't automatically buy the same social safety net that staying home would have.
Who actually moves and it isn't quite who you'd expect
The profile of the "typical" EU mover has shifted noticeably. As recently as 2012, 53% of mobile citizens had lived in their host country for less than ten years — a population still dominated by short-term, often younger movers. By 2024, that share had fallen to 43%. Mobility is no longer a young person's game either : 1.27 million EU citizens aged 40 to 70 relocated to another member state within the past decade.
And it isn't a one-way trip. In 2023 alone, 759,000 working-age EU citizens moved back to their home country : a reminder that a meaningful share of intra-EU mobility is circular, not permanent: people leave for a wage, a project, a partner, then return.
Where they actually end up
Cross-border commuting — living in one country and working in another without relocating at all — tells its own version of this story. Around 1.9 million people in the EU do this daily. The main countries of origin are France, Poland and Germany, together accounting for nearly half of all cross-border workers. But the destination side is heavily concentrated : Luxembourg's cross-border workers alone make up 45.1% of its entire workforce, followed by Switzerland at 9.1%. Two small, wealthy, centrally located economies absorb a wildly disproportionate share of the people willing to cross a border every morning for a better hourly rate.
So does mobility fix the gap?
Not on its own, and not for everyone. It works best for people who already have transferable capital that has nothing to do with income : a second or third language, a portable profession, no dependents tying them to a specific school or care system, and enough savings to absorb a few months of uncertainty. For everyone else, the freedom to move exists on paper in exactly the same way a "European citizenship" exists on paper for Partenope and Mila : real, guaranteed, and unevenly usable depending on where you started.
Sources
European Commission, DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, 2025 Annual Report on Intra-EU Labour Mobility (2023-2024 data), published April 2026
European Commission / Futurium Border Focal Point Network, cross-border worker statistics, 2025 edition
Intereconomics, Labour Mobility in the EU : Dynamics, Patterns and Policies
Social Europe / Eurofound, Labour Mobility Within the EU : The Real Picture
European Commission, Economy and Finance DG, Migration, Mobility and the EU Labour Market, special topic report, 2025
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