EF English Proficiency Index 2025: where Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia rank

Short answer: In the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, Croatia ranks 2nd in the world (617 points), North Macedonia 17th (595), Bosnia and Herzegovina 21st (591), and Serbia 25th (578). The Netherlands is 1st. The index covers 123 countries and 2.2 million test takers. This is the first edition that tested speaking and writing, not just reading and listening. When those were added, most European scores went down.

What the EF English Proficiency Index measures

The EF EPI is published every year by EF Education First. The 2025 edition uses results from 2.2 million people who took the free EF SET test during 2024, across 123 countries and regions.

Scores run from 1 to 800 and map onto CEFR levels:

EF EPI score	CEFR	Band
700 to 800	C2	Very high
600 to 699	C1	Very high
550 to 599	B2	High
500 to 549		Moderate
450 to 499	B1	Low

One thing changed this year, and it is the reason the report is worth reading rather than skimming. Until 2024 the test only measured reading and listening. Speaking and writing sections were added in early 2024. So this is the first index that shows what people can produce, not just what they can understand.

EF EPI 2025 rankings: the Balkans

Rank	Country	Score	Band
1	Netherlands	624	Very high
2	Croatia	617	Very high
11	Romania	605	Very high
17	North Macedonia	595	High
21	Bosnia and Herzegovina	591	High
25	Serbia	578	High

Serbia gained 10 points year on year, up from 568. Croatia also gained 10, from 607. Romania gained 12. The Netherlands, still first, lost 12.

Croatia at number two in the world is a genuinely big result. It is worth saying plainly what it is and is not: a national average from people who chose to take an online English test. It says something real about the talent pool. It says nothing about any one company's team.

Why speaking is the weakest English skill

This is the part that matters if you employ people.

Reading is the strongest skill in nearly 80% of countries. The report explains why:

Reading is the strongest English skill in nearly 80% of countries. It is the easiest skill for school systems to develop, well-adapted to classroom instruction even when classes are large, and among the easiest skills to practice on one's own.

Speaking is the opposite:

Speaking is the weakest English skill in a majority of countries and has the lowest worldwide average score with only three countries scoring in the high proficiency band for speaking (Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe: all of which have English as one of their official languages), and none in the very high proficiency band.

Three countries. All three have English as an official language. No country in the world reached the top band for speaking.

The report then says the thing most language reports leave out:

Speaking is also the most noticeable English skill among adults, the one which will allow an employee to shine in a meeting or make their way on a trip abroad.

If you run a team here, you have probably seen this without having a number for it. People read contracts in English fine. They follow a webinar without subtitles. Then they say almost nothing on a live call with the parent company. That is not strange. It is what happens when a language is learned mainly through reading and listening.

A higher score does not mean a more balanced team

This is the least obvious finding in the whole report:

Countries with higher English proficiency have larger skill gaps between their strongest and weakest skill, with the average gap almost twice as wide in very high proficiency countries compared to low and very low proficiency ones.

Gaps wider than 20 points are normal in every band. Only seven countries in the entire index have a roughly even level across all four skills.

So a rising national score does not mean a more balanced workforce. Often it means a workforce that got much better at reading while speaking stayed where it was.

What happened when speaking and writing were added

Appendix E of the report lists every country's score with and without the speaking and writing sections. In most of Europe, adding them pulled the score down.

Country	With speaking and writing	Without	Difference
Croatia	617	626	-9
Bosnia and Herzegovina	591	599	-8
Netherlands	624	631	-7
Romania	605	611	-6
Serbia	578	581	-3
Germany	615	616	-1

Croatia, second in the world, loses 9 points as soon as you ask people to produce English instead of recognise it. Serbia loses 3, which is one of the smaller drops in the region.

EF is careful about this and anyone quoting it should be too:

These new sections are optional, and the majority of test takers continue to certify only their receptive English skills. While the extension of testing to include productive English skills did shift scores slightly, most changes reflect genuine trends rather than artifacts of testing.

Read the productive numbers as a direction, not a precise measurement.

The report also notes that Europe's average level plateaued this year, and that European countries "have among the widest gaps between receptive and productive English skills in the world". Asia has the narrowest gap, at two points.

What to do with this if you are hiring or training

A proficiency level is not a description of what someone can do. A department averaging B2 tells you very little about whether it can hold a meeting. Look at the four skills separately, or at minimum separate what people understand from what they can say under time pressure. There is more on this in what B2 English actually means at work.

Spend the budget on the gap, not on the average. If reading is already strong, more general English training mostly improves the skill that was never the problem. Speaking improves through speaking time.

Look at your over-40s separately. The report found scores for adults over 40 slipped again this year, back to roughly where that group was a decade ago, and that adding speaking and writing hit them harder than younger adults because their gap between understanding and producing is wider. If those are the people representing you externally, that is worth knowing before a negotiation rather than after one.

One clear improvement

The gender gap that opened in favour of men early this decade is closing. It narrowed on every continent this year, and the number of countries with a significant gap fell from 48 to 37. In 82% of the countries where it did not narrow, the change was five points or less. EF links the whole episode to the pandemic and expects it to keep fading.

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Source: EF English Proficiency Index 2025, EF Education First, published 2025. Full report at ef.com/epi. Rankings quoted above are from the global table and Appendices D and E.

We run corporate English programs in this region and weight them toward speaking time, for the reason this report makes visible. If that is relevant: corporate program.