Euthanasia has accounted for 4 per cent of all deaths in Belgium in 2025, twice the share recorded five years earlier, according to the country’s Federal Commission for the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia.
The commission, which must report every two years under the law that legalised the practice, registered 4,487 euthanasia deaths in 2025. That was up from 3,991 in 2024 and from 2,445 in 2020, when euthanasia accounted for 1.9 per cent of deaths.
Belgium legalised euthanasia in 2002, becoming the second country in the world to do so after the Netherlands. More than 42,000 people have ended their lives this way since, a rise of some 1,800 per cent on the first full year of the law.
The steepest increase has come among patients whose death was not expected in the short term, understood by the commission as the coming months. There were 1,117 such cases in 2025, roughly one in four of the total and up from 311 in 2020.
Dementia was recorded as the basis for euthanasia in 77 cases in 2025, against 56 in 2024 and 250 per cent more than in 2018. A psychiatric disorder was given as the basis in 74 cases, up from 55 the previous year.
Across 2024 and 2025 the commission logged 532 people whose registration documents described them as experiencing weariness of living. It also recorded 13 couples euthanised at the same time, the first occasion on which such data had been collected.
Two people under the age of 18 were euthanised, one in each of the two years. Belgium removed the lower age limit for minors in 2014, subject to terminal illness and constant unbearable physical suffering.
The commission accepted a number of cases even though the procedural requirements set out in the law had not been followed to the letter. It has also complained repeatedly that it lacks the staff and funding to do its work.
Belgium remains a destination for patients from countries where the practice is restricted, with more than 120 non-residents euthanised in 2025, most of them French. France itself legalised euthanasia in July after the government overrode the Senate.
The Dutch figures point the same way. Euthanasia passed 10,000 deaths a year in the Netherlands in 2025, about 6 per cent of all deaths there.
Alisdair Hungerford-Morgan, chief executive of the British campaign group Right To Life UK, said people with mental or physical health conditions “deserve protection and the best possible care, not a pathway to suicide”.
He said the Belgian figures followed a pattern seen in other jurisdictions where the numbers climbed year on year, and described the increase in dementia cases as deeply disturbing.
