How many single parent families live in a certain area? How many residents in that area were born abroad? When did they arrive in the country? What proportion of dwellings in a given area are more than 50 years old? How many of these are unoccupied? How does your area compare with other parts of Europe? There is now an easy and flexible way to find answers to these questions: the Census Hub. This provides detailed information on individuals, families, households and housing in a country, region and even town.

The 2011 Census database is the result of a major joint effort by the European Statistical System (ESS) to better disseminate the results of the population and housing censuses in Europe, providing users with  easy access to detailed census data that are structured in the same way and methodologically comparable between countries.

Eurostat (the EU’s data office), together with and ESS members, set up the on-line application to enable users to access census data stored in each EU Member State via a single entry point on the Eurostat website. The Census Hub provides access to a huge and uniquely rich source of data, based on the national census exercises undertaken in EU Member States and EFTA countries during the year 2011, providing information at a detailed geographical level, down to individual municipalities. Users can build their own tables by combining data for different countries and at different scales. This was simply not possible in the past, when only highly aggregated data were available.