The contribution presents the level of living of population in Poland against the background of the selected countries of the European Union. The key to the selection of objects was the year of their accession to the European Union. All the selected countries joined the European Union in 2004.
The study covered years 2004 and 2009. It was based on the data collected by the Central Statistical Office of Poland, the Statistical Office of the EU and the OECD. In order to estimate level of living methods of multivariate statistical analysis were applied. On the basis of the synthetic variable, created for the research purposes, a ranking of countries was constructed
