Eurostat just published their Demography of Europe – 2026 edition, an interactive report covering population trends across all 27 EU member states over several decades. It is worth checking if you are interested in demographic data.

The headline is that the EU's 451 million people are growing slowly but ageing very fast. The share of people aged 65 and over has climbed from 17% to 22% in just two decades; the median age now sits at 44.9 years; and deaths have outnumbered births every year since 2012. With a fertility rate of just 1.34, well below the 2.1 needed to sustain a population.

What's keeping the numbers steady is immigration: nearly 6 million people arrived in 2024 alone. A quarter of children are now born to foreign-born mothers. The numbers make it pretty clear that Europe's demographic makeup is going to look quite different in a generation from now.

The USA is indeed a country of immigrants. In 2013, 41M people out of the total 316M population were foreign born, coming from all over the world. The top countries from that list are Mexico, China, India, Philippines, and Vietnam, but it's a true multinational and multicultural society that should be embraced!

The Eurostats office has an interesting dataset containing the crude marriage rate data for the last decades across the EU. It's quite remarkable how even if Portugal has one of the lowest rates in the EU, it used to be one of the highest in the 70's.

Eurostats has an interesting dataset showing the population change across Europe, including both the natural change and the net migration contribution. The graph above shows how the rapid decline trend is slowly reversing, but migration is the main component of this change.

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1	China	1376790000
2	India	1289590000
3	United States	323661000
4	Indonesia	257900000
5	Brazil	206140000
6	Pakistan	193273000
7	Nigeria	187200000
8	Bangladesh	160479000
9	Russia	141800000
10	Japan	126700000

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10 most populous countries in the world. Almost 60% of the world population lives there.

The European Union statistical office has an interesting article related to the impact of demographic ageing within the European Union (EU). One of the data tables shows the breakdown of the population for ages 0-14, 15-64, and over 65. The previous chart shows this breakdown by country for the 0-14 and +65 brackets. It's interesting how Ireland is the youngest country by far.

The European Union Stats office offers a dataset with the population density per country. The map above shows the latest data available from 2014. It's not surprising that Netherlands and Belgium have the highest density in continental Europe.