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This report highlights pollutants deemed most harmful to human health and those that most frequently show concentrations above the 2004 and 2008 EU air quality standards and WHO guideline levels.

The concentrations are obtained from monitoring station measurements and are officially reported to the EEA by its members and other collaborating countries. The EEA member countries are the 27 European Union Member States, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Türkiye. The six West Balkan countries are cooperating countries. These include Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo (the designation is without prejudice to position on status and is in line with UNSCR 1244/99 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence). Andorra reports data on a voluntary basis.

The classification of the monitoring stations and the criteria used to determine their inclusion in the analysis are described here. The number of countries that submitted data and the number of monitoring stations with the minimum data coverage required vary for each pollutant. This is summarised in Table 11 for 2023 and Table 12 for 2024. When referring to countries reporting data above certain levels, it means that they reported at least one station with concentrations that surpassed them.

Data for 2023 and 2024 were extracted from the EEA’s reporting system on 27 January 2025 and 19 February 2025, respectively.

The analysis for 2023 is based on officially validated data reported by countries. The analysis for 2024 is based on provisional up-to-date (UTD) data. It may change once fully validated data are received by the EEA and more countries are considered. Validated data for 2024 will only be available later in 2025 and will be presented in the 2026 briefing.

Additional information and further analysis are available in the Eionet status reports ETC-HE 2025/2 (ETC-HE, 2025b) and ETC-HE 2025/1 (ETC-HE, 2025a), prepared by the European Topic Centre on Human Health and the Environment (ETC HE).

Further information on the concentrations of air pollutants, including those for previous years, can be found at the EEA’s statistics viewer. Data can be downloaded here.

Apart from the measurements from monitoring stations, some countries also reported 2023 official data from modelling applications, which are available from the Air Quality Modelling Viewer. The results from these modelling applications have been included in this analysis where they implied concentrations above the EU standards.