Social class in Luxembourg after 1945 is generally based on occupation, personal income, and spending power as well as rights to social welfare rather than birth circumstances and family background. The country's demographic situation has changed considerably since 1945, where a mostly blue-collar working population gave way to mostly white-collar occupations over the second half of the twentieth century.^[1] Differences in consumer patterns between the white-collar and blue-collar workers decreased considerably between 1963 and 1977, causing a socio-economic evolution that saw a wider sphere of access for both working and middle classes to consumer goods such as cars, white goods, and real estate, thus demonstrating an equalisation of social strata in terms of income and spending power. The population of Luxembourg has also altered in nature due to significant growth in numbers of residents and increases in migration patterns since the mid-twentieth century; in 1961 13% of the population consisted of non-Luxembourgers, by 2020, this is at 44.3. At present, 47% of the Luxembourgish population has a migrant background’, and this is as a result of the response to socioeconomic processes that drew large numbers of immigrants to the country in the latter half of the twentieth century.^[2]

In the late 1950s, André Heiderscheid outlined the different social classes in Luxembourg as ‘milieu ouvrier’, ‘milieu agricole’, ‘classe moyenne’ and ‘milieu bourgeois’,^[3] in other words, working class, which forms the bulk of the working population and is mainly found in the secondary sector; the primary sector or agricultural class, which has seen a significant decrease in the latter half of the twentieth century; and proportionally smaller number of middle class and bourgeoisie. These categories are still applicable on a superficial basis, but social changes and improvements in living conditions in the past sixty years have meant that the working classes or those working within what are described traditionally as ‘lower income’ socioeconomic groups are often now on a par materially with those in traditional ‘middle income groups’, and what were typical ‘working-class’ occupations in terms of income have become more ‘office’ oriented, that is, employment in the tertiary sector. There are groups for whom personal income and access to social welfare pose problems, and poverty, unemployment and homelessness also exist in Luxembourg, although perhaps not to the same extent as in other European countries.

The agricultural classes in Luxembourg are seen as a ‘traditional class’, where generations of the same families owned and worked landholdings of varying sizes, although smallholdings were the most predominant type. Farming currently accounts for 1-3% of economic activity in Luxembourg and is subsidised by the government and the European Union. With the increase of industrialization in the late nineteenth century, more and more agricultural workers moved from the country to work in the industrial sector. It is also the case that some agricultural workers maintained a smallholding whilst also working in the steel or mining industries, and some still have a secondary occupation to farming – as at 2014, 645 agricultural workers out of 1,341 were listed as having ‘secondary occupations’.^[10] With regard to farming in Luxembourg, the late 1940s heralded a permanent change in the social landscape of the countryside; the farming community ‘lost out’ to growth in other economic areas; from the 1950s, landholdings of less than 10 hectares gradually disappeared, and between 1947 and 1970 16,400 people departed from the agricultural sector, where the Trente Glorieuses for the secondary sector was concurrent with permanent decline of one of the two socio-economic pillars of Luxembourgish society.^[11]

The percentage of workers in agriculture has continued to drop dramatically throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. In 1947 of a total of 134,288 workers in all sectors, there were 30,050 workers in agriculture, reducing to 9,641 in 1970 and by 2001 the number was only 3,321 members of the working population of 185,352. Most farms in Luxembourg are family-owned, but by 1990 the number in this category was 3,768 and by 2020 this number had reduced further to 1,881, with an increase in the amount of group holdings from 41 to 88 from 1990 to 2014.^[12] Agricultural activity in Luxembourg is mainly arable, viticulture, dairy and meat farming. The average area per land holding out of 2,042 farms in Luxembourg as at 2020 is 77.9 hectares, but most farms are of 100 ha and above at 521 of their total number, an increase in the amount of larger farms held since 1990, when lands held over 100ha counted at just 106.^[13] Another reason for the reduction in farming in Luxembourg is that much of the land has been sold off for construction to meet increasing demands for housing, and as land prices are high, this allows for landowners to benefit significantly from real estate income.

André Heiderscheid described this section of the population in the late 1950s/early 1960s as those who fall into the ‘middle income’ category, such as retailers, artisans, lower framework employees in industry and civil service and technicians, who quite quickly, for material reasons, became part of the general working classes. The ‘bourgeoisie’, according to the same observer, involves those who are employed in the higher levels of civil service, businessmen, and members of the liberal professions (law, medicine, architecture, accountancy, teaching), but where a true bourgeoisie class has had difficulty in full development because of a ‘lack of tradition’.^[14] This group accounts for a proportionally small section of the Luxembourgish population, although it has seen considerable growth over time, as in other socio-economic groups, and thus has been able to benefit from the unprecedented growth in the economy in the last sixty years.^[15] In 1965, for example, there were 324 doctors and dentists in Luxembourg, and in 2015 the number was 1,379; similarly, the number of those in the legal profession has risen from 130 in 1965 to 1,633 in 2015.

However, one particular group from Heiderscheid's assessment of the middle classes has lost out to economic growth; the individual shop-owner; the arrival of the first supermarket in Walferdange in 1967 seriously affected the livelihoods of the small, artisanal retailers.^[16] Relatively new occupations in the tertiary sector such as wealth management, investment advisory services and senior banking positions began developing and allowing for high incomes and standards of living usually associated with ‘traditional’ liberal professions categorised within the middle- and upper-middle classes. Education, especially to tertiary level, and the social mobility that goes with it, has also seen many move up from working class to middle class over the past 50 years.^[17]

Latterly, Luxembourg is often seen as synonymous with great wealth, although essentially this accounts for a very small proportion of the population. The Inaugural Wealth Report (2014) published by the Julius Baer Group stated that Luxembourg has the highest proportion of ‘millionaire households’ in Europe, with 22.7% of those in the higher income bracket possessing a net worth of over one million euros; real estate ownership is closely linked to this assertion. In terms of private wealth, Luxembourg also has the highest proportion in Europe, with adults worth on average 432,221 euros, and one third of the country's total private wealth of 31% is owned by just 1% of the richest section of the population, and since 2007, wealth in Luxembourg has grown by 36%, although this rate is low compared to that of Switzerland where the wealth growth rate was 68%.