The Europe Sustainable Development Report 2025 provides a quantitative assessment of SDG priorities for the EU, EFTA countries, the UK and candidate countries. The report builds on the methodology of the Sustainable Development Report, developed by the SDSN and Bertelsmann Stiftung to track countries’ performance on the 17 SDGs. The methodology has been peer-reviewed (Schmidt-Traub et al., 2017) and statistically audited—via the 2019 global edition—by the European Commission Joint Research Centre (Papadimitriou et al., 2019b). The SDG Index has been listed among the ten composite indices useful for policymaking by the European Parliamentary Research Service (European Parliament, 2021).

The data of this edition were extracted between October and November 2024. The 2025 SDG Index for Europe includes 111 indicators, including 103 that permit an evaluation of progress over time. The same indicator set is used for all countries to generate comparable scores and rankings. Approximately 70% of the indicators come from official statistics (primarily services of the European Commission) and 30% from non-official data sources (NGOs, academia). The full list of sources by indicator is available online. The selection of indicators and performance thresholds benefited from inputs submitted in various rounds of stakeholder consultations, including an online public consultation on preliminary data and results in December 2024.

The Europe Sustainable Development Report 2025 covers 41 European countries, including 3 additional countries not previously covered: Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, reflecting the latest enlargement of the candidate countries. Due to time lags and data gaps, the data for Ukraine do not fully reflect the severe consequences of the war since February 2022. This year, the report includes three new indicators, including the Disability employment gap, Victims of human trafficking, and the Index of countries’ support to UN-based multilateralism. For the full list of new indicators and modifications as well as the full indicator metadata, please consult the Codebook which is available for download online.

Performance thresholds ('upper bound') for each indicator were determined using the following decision tree:

1. Use absolute quantitative thresholds in SDGs and targets: e.g. zero poverty, universal school completion, universal access to water and sanitation, full gender equality.

2. Apply the principle of ‘leave no one behind’ when no explicit SDG target is available.

3. When available, use science-based or technical targets that must be achieved by 2030 or later (e.g. net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from energy by 2050, 80% yield gap closure).

4. For all other indicators, use the average of the top performers.

The lower bound (0%) was defined at the lowest 2.5^th percentile either from the global Sustainable Development Report or from the European countries included in the Europe-specific datasets.

To make the data comparable across indicators, each variable was rescaled from 0 to 100 with 0 denoting worst performance and 100 describing the optimum. After establishing the upper and lower bounds, variables were transformed linearly to a scale between 0 and 100 using the following rescaling formula for the range [0; 100]:

Image A.1 | Rescaling equation

where x is raw data value; max/min denote the bounds for best and worst performance, respectively; and x’ is the normalized value after rescaling. Each indicator distribution was censored, so that all values exceeding the upper bound scored 100, and values below the lower bound scored 0.

The rescaling equation ensured that higher values indicated better performance. In this way, the rescaled data became easy to interpret: a country with a score of 75 has covered three quarters of the distance from worst to best.

To compute the SDG Index, we first calculate scores for each goal using the arithmetic mean of the scores of the indicators for that goal. These goal scores are then averaged across all 17 SDGs to obtain the SDG Index score. Equal weights were used for aggregating indicator scores into the goal scores, and for aggregating goal scores into the overall index score.

Averaging across all indicators for an SDG might hide areas of policy concern if a country performs well on most indicators but faces serious shortfalls on one or two metrics within the same SDG (often called the ‘substitutability’ or ‘compensation’ issue). As a result, the SDG Dashboards are based only on the two variables on which a country performed worst—except for Goal 3, where the three worst indicators are used. The dashboards use a ‘traffic light’ colour scheme (green, yellow, orange and red) to illustrate how far a country is from achieving a particular goal. A red rating was applied only if both the worst-performing indicators score red. Similarly, in order to score green, all indicators under the goal must be green.

Using panel data, we estimate how fast a country has been progressing towards an SDG and determine whether—if continued into the future—this pace will suffice to achieve the SDG by 2030. To estimate SDG trends, we calculated the linear annual growth rates needed to achieve the goal (green threshold) by 2030 (2015–2030), which we compared to the average annual growth rate over the most recent period starting from the year of the adoption of the SDGs (e.g. 2015–2023). A green arrow denotes ‘on track or maintaining performance above goal achievement’, the intermediate yellow and orange arrows denote insufficient progress, and a red arrow indicates movement away from the target. Countries that have already achieved an SDG target, but whose performance has worsened since 2015 are assigned an orange arrow ‘stagnation.’

To simplify the analysis, we provide population-weighted averages using the following country groupings described in the table below. The online database provides detailed results by individual country and country groupings for all the indicators and goals.

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