CSO, 24 September 2025, 11am
This release, using methodology that is under development, estimates the number of vacant residential dwellings in 2023 by using low electricity usage as a proxy for vacancy.
Dwellings are deemed vacant based on low levels of electricity consumption over a period of at least four consecutive quarters. Low electricity consumption in this case means it would only be enough to power a medium-sized fridge on a daily basis over a consecutive 12-month period.
This release is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. This means that particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
Publishing outputs under the Frontier Series allows the CSO to provide new information to users, explore the value or new data sources or methods, and provide insight on areas of interest. We welcome feedback on these new methods and outputs and we ensure the limitations of the data are well explained and understood. Learn more about the methodology used for this release in our Background Notes.
The Government policy document, Housing for All: A New Housing Plan for Ireland, identifies a requirement for data relating to residential vacancy in order to facilitate more efficient use of the existing housing stock. As metered electricity consumption data in Ireland is collected by a single organisation, ESB Networks, it offers the CSO an opportunity to explore how this data could deliver insights into housing occupancy and vacancy levels in the State.
Residential vacancy based on metered electricity consumption analyses levels of electricity consumption and low usage in individual dwellings to estimate residential vacancy. To reduce the possibility of misclassifying occupied dwellings as vacant, very low electricity consumption recorded over a 12-month period is required for a dwelling to be classified as vacant for the purposes of this analysis.
The classification of active ESB network connections with a suitably low level of consumption over four consecutive quarters as vacant is intended to estimate a measure of long-term vacancy. The use of electricity data to proxy dwelling level occupancy has also recently been used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Currently, there is no single accepted national or international standard on how residential vacancy can be either defined or measured.
In this release for example, a dwelling is defined as vacant when it has very low electricity consumption over four consecutive quarters (12 months). This definition gives the opportunity to track vacancy over an extended period of time.
The data in this release cannot be compared directly with other measures of vacancy used by the CSO or other Government bodies as they may have distinct definitions of vacancy. For example, this data is not comparable with the Revenue’s measure of vacancy published in their Property Tax Analysis.
This also applies to different releases from the CSO where different definitions apply or where other methods of data collection have been used. For example, the data in this release is distinct from the Census 2022 measure of vacancy which includes dwellings that are unoccupied for both short and long periods, and therefore typically includes more dwellings. The stock of dwellings used in this release is related to the number of active ESB connections. This differs from the Census where the dwelling stock is primarily based on information gathered by the enumeration field staff on the ground at the time of the Census.
The data is this release also cannot be directly compared with the Vacant Dwelling Indicators based on Metered Electricity Consumption release published by the CSO in 2021 as the methodology used has been refined.
As such, the definition of vacancy and method of data collection used in this release may not necessarily be suited to all users’ requirements and the figures contained within it may vary significantly from other approaches to estimating residential vacancy.
Among the benefits of using the ESB network data to measure vacancy is that it is a single source of information, and low electricity usage can potentially be used as a proxy for vacancy. It also provides geographical granularity and the capacity to link to other administrative data sources within the CSO for enrichment and validation.
Our analysis does not look at why dwellings may be vacant and there can be several reasons for residential vacancy. The data in this release does not identify if residential vacancies are available or not for occupancy.
The CSO reviewed residential vacancy based on metered electricity consumption as a form of analysis and we use a different, but legitimate, measure of vacancy compared with other organisations.
Learn about our data and confidentiality safeguards, and the steps we take to produce statistics that can be trusted by all.