Demographics of Sweden

Cities

Sweden has 17 cities with a population of over 100,000 people. Most of Sweden's population lives in Svealand and Götaland.

Fertility

The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on fairly good data for the entire period. Sources: Our World In Data and Gapminder Foundation.^[6]

Life expectancy

Sources: Our World In Data and the United Nations.

1751–1949

1950–2015

Source: UN World Population Prospects

Statistics

Demographic statistics according to the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.^[8]

View source data.

^{[fn 1]}

Population change

The demography of Sweden is monitored by Statistics Sweden (SCB).

The 2005 Swedish census showed an increase of 1,488,322 compared to the 1990 census, an average increase of 88,680 annually. During the 1930s, birth rate increased by more than 88128.5 children per year while death rates fell and immigration surged. In the early 2000s, birth rate declined as immigration increased further, with the context of unrest in the Middle East, upholding steady population growth.^[9][10]

Population projections

In 1950 Sweden had fewer people aged 10–20 with more people ages 20–30 and 0–10. In 2017 the ratio of male to female remains steady at about 50–50. As a whole, the graph broadens with people appearing to live longer. In 2050 it is predicted that all ages will increase from below 300,000 males and females to above 300,000 males and females. With about 50,000 people living to the ages of 90–100. In 2100 the graph is shaped as a rectangle with people of all ages and genders remaining steady. It narrows slightly at the top of the graph with about 250,000/300,000 males and females living to be 90–100 years old.^[11] Statistics Sweden projects the following population development in Sweden:^[12]

Eurostat projects a population in Sweden reaching 11,994,364 people in 2040 and 14,388,478 in 2080.^[13]

Urbanisation and population density

The population density is just over 25 people per km² (65 per square mile), with 1,437 persons per km² in localities (continuous settlement with at least 200 inhabitants).^[14],[15] 87% of the population live in urban areas, which cover 1.5% of the entire land area.^[16] 63% of Swedes are in large urban areas.^[16] The population density is substantially higher in the south than in the north. The capital city Stockholm has a municipal population of about 950,000 (with 1.5 million in the urban area and 2.3 million in the metropolitan area). The second- and third-largest cities are Gothenburg and Malmö. Greater Gothenburg counts just over a million inhabitants and the same goes for the western part of Scania, along the Öresund. The Öresund Region, the Danish-Swedish cross-border region around the Öresund that Malmö is part of, has a population of 4 million. Outside of major cities, areas with notably higher population density include the agricultural part of Östergötland, the western coast, the area around Lake Mälaren and the agricultural area around Uppsala.

Norrland, which covers approximately 60% of the Swedish territory, has a very low population density (below 5 people per square kilometer). The mountains and most of the remote coastal areas are almost unpopulated. Low population density exists also in large parts of western Svealand, as well as southern and central Småland. An area known as Finnveden, which is located in the south-west of Småland, and mainly below the 57th parallel, can also be considered as almost empty of people.

Extended origin background statistics

More information Country, 1st generation ...

Extended origin background statistics

Country	1994[33]
	1st generation	2nd generation	Total
Nordic countries	298,844	349,140	647,984
Denmark	40,907		93,650
Finland	207,796	235,042	442,838
Iceland	4,285		6,358
Norway	45,851		108,340
Other Europe	306,503	182,996	489,499
Greece	12,441		23,671
Yugoslavia	112,320	36,685	149,005
Poland	39,009		62,533
Romania	10,885	3,136	14,021
United Kingdom	12,569		24,588
Germany	36,500		86,894
Hungary	14,799		27,646
Other	67,980		101,141
Africa	44,961	22,740	67,701
Ethiopia	11,384	4,056	15,440
Other Africa	33,577	18,68	35,445
North America	15,598	17,370	32,968
United States	13,746	15,586	29,332
Other North America	1,852	1,784	3,636
Latin America	53,471	21,262	74,733
Asia	34,941	11,257	46,198
India	9,953		13,607
Vietnam	9,219		12,626
South Korea	8,447		9,895
Thailand	7,322		10,070
Middle East + Turkey	131,989	53,189	185,178
Iraq	23,389		29,454
Iran	48,693		59,246
Syria	9,072	5,973	15,045
Lebanon	21,593		31,248
Turkey	29,242		50,185
Oceania	2,232	1,243	3,475
Total	922,055	676,468	1,598,523

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Current vital statistics

More information Period, Live births ...

Period	Live births	Deaths	Natural increase
January-February 2025	15,578	16,776	–1,198
January-February 2026	15,717	17,513	–1,796
Difference	+139 (+0.89%)	+737 (+4.39%)	−598
Source:[39]

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Total fertility rates by areas

Structure of the population

Emigration

Between 1820 and 1930, approximately 1.3 million Swedes, a third of the country's population at the time, emigrated to North America, and most of them to the United States. There are more than 4.4 million Swedish Americans according to a 2006 US Census Bureau estimate.^[42] In Canada, the community of Swedish ancestry is 330,000 strong.^[43]

Immigration

The demographic profile of Sweden has altered considerably due to immigration patterns since the 1970s. As of 2020, Statistics Sweden reported that around 2,686,040 or 25.9% of the inhabitants of Sweden were from a foreign background: that is, each such person either had been born abroad or had been born in Sweden to two parents who themselves had both been born abroad.^[44] Also taking into account people with only one parent born abroad, this number increases to one third (33.5%).^[45]

Additionally, the birth rate among immigrant women after arriving in Sweden is somewhat higher than among ethnic Swedes.^[46] Taking into account the fact that immigrant women have on average fewer^{[citation needed]} children than Swedish women of comparable age, however, the difference in total birth rate is only 0.1 children more if the woman is foreign born – with the disclaimer that some women may have children not immigrating to and not reported in Sweden, who are thus not included in the statistics.^[47]

Contemporary immigration

Since the early 1970s, immigration to Sweden has been mostly due to refugee migration and family reunification from countries in the Middle East and Latin America.^[52] According to Eurostat, in 2010, there were 1.33 million foreign-born residents in Sweden, corresponding to 14.3% of the total population. Of these, 859,000 (64.3%) were born outside the EU and 477,000 (35.7%) were born in another EU Member State.^[53][54] By comparison, the Swedish civil registry reports, for 2018, that nearly 1.96 million residents are foreign-born, a 47% increase from 2010. There are 8.27 million Swedish-born residents, giving a total population of 10.23 million, and a 19.1% foreign-born population.^[55] Malmö, the third largest city of Sweden and Skåne County as a whole have taken in highest numbers of refugees who reached Sweden, in particular during the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s and the Syrian civil war in the 2010s.^{[56][57][58][59]}

The first group of Assyrians/Syriacs moved to Sweden from Lebanon in 1967. Many of them live in Södertälje (Stockholm).^[60][61] There are also around 40,000 Roma in Sweden.^[62] Some Roma people have long historical roots in Sweden, while others are more recent migrants from elsewhere in Europe.

Immigrants from Western Asia have been a rapidly growing share of Sweden's population. According to the government agency Statistics Sweden, the number of immigrants born in all of Asia (including the Middle East) rose from just 1,000 in 1950 to 295,000 in 2003.^[63] Most of those immigrants came from Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Syria, according to Statistics Sweden.^[63]

Immigration of Iraqis increased dramatically during the Iraq War, beginning in 2003. A total of 8,951 Iraqis came to Sweden in 2006, accounting for 45% of the entire Iraqi migration to Europe. By 2007, the community of Iraqis in Sweden numbered above 70,000. In 2008, Sweden introduced tighter rules on asylum seekers.^[64]

A significant number of Syrian Christians have also settled in Sweden. There have also been immigrants from South-Central Asia such as Afghanistan and India. Since the European migrant crisis, Syrians became the second-largest group of foreign-born persons in the Swedish civil registry in 2017 with 158,443 people (after former Yugoslavia).

Note that the table below lists the citizenship the person had when arriving in Sweden, and therefore there are no registered Eritreans, Russians or Bosnians from 1990, they were recorded as Ethiopians, Soviets and Yugoslavs. The nationality of Yugoslavs below is therefore people who came to Sweden from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before 1991 and people who came from today's Montenegro and Serbia before 2003, then called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Counting all people who came from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, there were 176,033 people from there in 2018.

More information Country ...

The 49 countries with over 10,000 foreign-born persons in 2024.^[65]

Country	1900	1930	1960	1990	2000	2010	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
Syria	–	–	6	5,874	14,162	20,758	193,594	196,077	197,799	197,201	196,152	194,606
Iraq	–	–	16	9,818	49,372	121,761	146,440	146,769	146,831	145,586	143,160	141,451
Finland	6,644	9,746	101,307	217,636	195,447	169,521	140,337	136,607	133,083	129,406	125,904	122,462
Poland	–	1,065	6,347	35,631	40,123	70,253	93,762	95,076	98,387	100,706	100,062	98,311
Iran	2	8	115	40,084	51,101	62,120	81,301	83,122	85,488	86,838	87,115	87,292
Somalia	–	–	–	1,441	13,082	37,846	70,184	70,087	69,477	68,290	66,846	65,960
former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia	–	19	1,532	43,346	71,972	70,819	63,419	62,444	61,554	60,636	59,692	58,757
Afghanistan	–	–	17	534	4,287	14,420	60,858	62,803	65,662	67,738	68,164	68,819
Bosnia and Herzegovina	–	–	–	–	51,526	56,183	60,161	60,194	60,265	60,003	59,333	58,749
Turkey	15	22	202	25,528	31,894	42,527	52,628	54,004	55,954	56,871	57,389	57,783
Germany	5,107	8,566	37,580	37,558	38,155	48,158	51,434	52,960	55,642	56,969	57,871	58,461
Eritrea	–	–	–	–	3,054	10,301	47,156	48,278	49,213	49,639	49,704	49,740
Thailand	–	–	20	4,934	10,353	31,378	44,339	45,109	45,631	45,940	45,882	46,036
India	45	135	361	9,054	11,110	17,863	42,790	47,369	53,973	58,094	59,290	61,298
Norway	7,978	14,731	37,253	52,744	42,464	43,480	41,062	40,625	40,277	39,951	39,370	38,934
Denmark	6,872	8,726	35,112	43,931	38,190	45,548	38,929	38,474	38,070	37,655	37,203	36,708
China (not including Hong Kong)	34	201	520	3,896	8,150	23,998	36,023	37,172	38,461	38,253	38,976	40,338
Romania	3	34	719	8,785	11,776	19,741	32,741	33,695	35,565	36,738	36,870	36,681
United Kingdom	779	1,270	2,738	11,378	14,602	20,839	31,035	31,993	32,575	32,916	33,143	33,278
Lebanon	–	–	15	15,986	20,038	24,116	28,885	29,313	29,770	29,876	29,774	29,576
Chile	6	28	69	27,635	26,842	28,387	27,918	27,894	27,869	27,756	27,427	27,186
United States	5,130	8,852	10,874	13,001	14,413	17,179	23,290	24,173	24,970	25,739	25,437	26,285
Russia	1,506	–	–	–	6,523	15,511	22,774	23,455	24,775	25,568	26,529	26,680
Ethiopia	5	–	59	10,027	11,907	13,822	22,125	22,672	23,141	23,363	23,463	23,634
Pakistan	–	–	11	2,291	3,100	10,265	21,172	24,183	27,292	28,614	29,760	32,075
Vietnam	–	–	1	6,265	10,898	14,584	21,126	21,528	21,874	21,983	21,842	21,998
Greece	5	22	266	13,171	10,851	11,381	19,737	19,931	20,672	21,237	21,520	21,720
Hungary	50	108	8,544	15,045	14,127	15,339	16,480	16,381	16,568	16,900	16,960	16,858
Lithuania	–	149	–	233	785	6,735	15,917	16,434	17,396	17,944	17,878	17,566
Serbia	–	–	–	–	–	5,324	15,874	16,719	17,567	17,927	17,909	17,875
Philippines	–	–	5	2,613	5,460	9,826	15,640	16,219	16,790	17,311	17,683	18,153
Italy	200	367	4,904	5,989	6,337	7,804	14,155	14,786	15,665	16,397	16,786	17,065
Colombia	–	–	73	4,650	7,317	10,531	13,060	13,411	13,782	14,055	14,217	14,377
Spain	30	64	867	4,917	5,079	6,763	12,930	13,409	14,060	14,534	14,681	14,714
Netherlands	50	208	2,105	3,543	4,532	8,700	12,769	13,523	14,774	15,772	16,829	18,062
Bangladesh	–	–	–	1,571	2,937	6,289	12,279	12,965	13,904	13,987	14,461	15,427
Croatia	–	–	–	–	5,229	6,277	12,207	12,559	13,016	13,204	12,975	12,650
Ukraine	–	–	–	–	1,459	4,741	11,899	12,891	13,937	14,297	41,767	47,960
Morocco	–	–	22	2,720	4,492	7,391	11,898	12,207	12,573	12,823	12,914	12,973
France	255	599	1,750	3,844	5,602	7,944	11,854	12,618	13,445	14,006	14,270	14,585
South Korea	–	–	47	8,205	9,170	10,398	11,719	11,795	11,945	11,985	11,968	11,898
Egypt								10,268	10,768	10,866	10,979	11,108
North Macedonia									10,653	11,131	11,195	11,162
Bulgaria								10,052	10,427	10,741	10,685	10,563
Latvia									10,323	11,154	11,362	11,327
Kosovo	–	–	–	–	–	2,288	11,164	11,920	12,605	12,913	12,891	12,915
Brazil	41	92	175	2,118	3,496	6,005	10,725	11,680	12,832	13,305	13,439	13,651
Albania										10,453	10,763	11,065
Sri Lanka										10,420	11,380	12,117
Total	35,627	61,657	299,879	790,445	1,003,798	1,384,929	2,046,731

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