Sweden Population Statistics 2026 | Demographics & Key Facts

Population of Sweden 2026

Sweden’s population stood at 10,605,725 people as of April 2026, according to Statistics Sweden (SCB), the country’s official government statistics agency. That figure represents growth of just 0.2% compared with the same period a year earlier, confirming that one of the slowest periods of population growth Sweden has recorded in decades is still very much underway. Having first crossed the 10 million mark in January 2017, Sweden has kept expanding, but the pace has cooled sharply since the mid-2010s as both births and immigration numbers have pulled back.

This article breaks down the Sweden population statistics for 2026 using verified data sourced directly from SCB, covering total population growth, regional and municipal distribution, age structure, births and fertility, life expectancy, migration, foreign background, and long-term projections. Every figure below reflects official government releases current as of 2026, offering a grounded picture of where Sweden’s population stands today and how it is expected to evolve through the rest of the century.

Interesting Facts About Sweden Population 2026

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB)

The number that anchors this whole picture is 10,605,725, Sweden’s total population as of April 2026, but the details behind it show a country whose growth engine is sputtering. Just 97,500 babies were born in 2025, the lowest annual total since 2002, while 92,000 people died, leaving a natural increase of only a few thousand. Immigration, long the main driver of growth, fell to under 90,000 in 2025, the lowest level since 2006 aside from the pandemic year of 2020, and the total fertility rate of 1.43 remains far below the replacement level of 2.1.

Life expectancy continues to climb even as growth slows, reaching 85.6 years for women and 82.5 years for men in 2025. Households passed 5,002,600 at the end of the year, and 24.9% of the population now has a foreign background, meaning they were either born abroad or born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents. With a population density of just 25.9 people per km², Sweden remains one of the more sparsely populated countries in the EU, even with its population heavily concentrated in the southern third of the country.

1. Total Population and Growth Rate in Sweden 2026

Average Annual Population Growth
2020-2024 |███████████████████████████████████  52,000/year
2025-2029 |████████                            ~12,000/year (projected)
2026      |▼ approx. -20,000 (projected decrease)

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), Population Statistics and Population Projections

Sweden’s population reached 10,605,529 at the end of 2025, made up of 5,274,950 women and 5,330,576 men, a gap that first flipped in men’s favour back in March 2015. Looking at the bigger trend, the population grew by 840,000 people over the decade from 2014 to 2024, averaging 52,000 additional people a year between 2020 and 2024 alone. That pace, however, is projected to fall to roughly 12,000 people a year on average between 2025 and 2029, a dramatic slowdown driven by both a lower birth surplus and reduced net migration.

2026 stands out as a particularly unusual year in SCB’s own projections, with the population actually expected to shrink by around 20,000 people. This is a direct consequence of the temporary protection directive covering Ukrainian refugees expiring on 4 March 2026, which is expected to trigger a wave of departures large enough to outweigh the combined effect of births, deaths, and other migration. Beyond that short-term dip, SCB expects growth to resume, but only because immigration is projected to keep exceeding emigration, since deaths are set to outnumber births in most years going forward.

2. Regional Population Distribution in Sweden 2026

Share of National Population by County
Stockholm         |██████████████████████████  ~23%
Västra Götaland   |██████████████████            ~17%
Skåne             |██████████████                 ~14%
Rest of Sweden    |████████████████████████████████████████  ~46%

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), Regional Population Statistics

Sweden’s population is heavily concentrated in its three largest counties, which together hold over half of the national total on a comparatively small slice of the country’s land area. Stockholm County leads by a wide margin at around 2.5 million residents, more than 23% of the national population, and it also has by far the highest population density of any county at 374.6 people per km². Västra Götaland, home to Gothenburg, and Skåne, home to Malmö, follow with around 1.8 million and 1.4 million residents respectively, giving the three counties combined a population larger than many entire European nations.

At the other end of the scale, Gotland County, Sweden’s island region in the Baltic Sea, has just around 60,000 residents, making it the least populous county by a clear margin. This concentration pattern also shows up in density rankings: eight of the ten highest-density municipalities in the country sit within Stockholm County, with only Malmö and Gothenburg breaking into that top-ten list from outside the capital region, underlining just how dominant the Stockholm area is in Sweden’s overall population map.

3. Largest Cities and Municipalities in Sweden 2026

Largest Municipalities (Kommun), End of 2025
Stockholm  |████████████████████████████████████████  999,000+
Gothenburg |████████████████████████                  609,000+
Malmö      |███████████████                           368,000

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), Municipal Population Statistics

Stockholm remains Sweden’s largest municipality by a wide margin, closing in on the symbolic one-million mark with just over 999,000 residents at the end of 2025. Gothenburg, the country’s main port city and home to Volvo and Chalmers University of Technology, passed 609,000 residents and actually added more new residents than any other municipality in Sweden during 2025, with 4,283 new arrivals. Malmö, connected to Copenhagen via the Öresund Bridge, sits at around 368,000 and has grown the fastest of the three big cities in percentage terms over the past decade.

Beyond the big three, growth has been notably uneven across the country’s 290 municipalities. University towns and commuter suburbs close to Stockholm, such as Uppsala, Knivsta, and Nacka, have expanded quickly, while many smaller municipalities in northern and central Sweden have shrunk. In fact, 180 of Sweden’s 290 municipalities actually lost population during 2025, the first time that has happened on this scale since the early 2000s, reinforcing just how lopsided Sweden’s population growth has become between its urban south and its sparsely populated north.

4. Age Structure and the Ageing Population in Sweden 2026

Share of Population Aged 80 and Over
2025        |██████                8.6% -> 6% (just over 6%)
2070 (proj) |███████████           11%

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), Population Pyramid and Demographic Analysis

Sweden’s population pyramid is steadily losing its youthful base and gaining weight at the top. As of 2025, just over 6% of the population is aged 80 or older, and SCB’s long-range projections expect that share to nearly double to 11% by 2070 as the large cohort born in the 1940s continues moving into advanced old age. At birth, the sex ratio still favours boys, with around 106 born for every 100 girls, but that gap closes and then reverses with age, since women in Sweden continue to outlive men by a meaningful margin.

One quirk in Sweden’s demographic history is that men have actually outnumbered women nationally since March 2015, a first for the modern era, driven mainly by a narrowing gap in life expectancy between the sexes and by immigration patterns that have historically skewed slightly male. That said, the age structure is still shifting toward older cohorts overall, a trend reinforced by the fact that 2020 saw the highest number of annual deaths this century, at just over 98,000, during the height of the pandemic, a spike that has since eased but that foreshadowed the more gradual rise in deaths now expected as the population ages further.

5. Births and Fertility in Sweden 2026

Births vs Deaths, 2025
Births |█████████████████████████████████   97,500
Deaths |████████████████████████████████    92,000

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), Population Projections and Births Statistics

Sweden recorded just 97,500 live births in 2025, the lowest annual figure since 2002, against 92,000 deaths, leaving only a thin natural increase of around 5,500 people. The total fertility rate sat at 1.43 in 2024, well below the 2.1 needed for a generation to replace itself without migration, and SCB expects the number of births to keep falling for a few more years, bottoming out at around 95,000 in 2028 before gradually recovering toward the 2025 level by around 2030.

Fertility also differs meaningfully by where mothers were born. In 2022, women born in Sweden had a total fertility rate of 1.47, while foreign-born women had a noticeably higher rate of 1.69, continuing a pattern seen in earlier years where foreign-born mothers consistently show higher fertility than Swedish-born mothers, even as both rates have declined over time. This gap matters for Sweden’s demographic outlook, since a shrinking pool of women at prime childbearing ages, combined with these diverging fertility patterns by birthplace, is one of the key forces SCB points to when explaining why the birth count keeps sliding even though the fertility rate itself is not collapsing quite as fast.

6. Life Expectancy in Sweden 2026

Life Expectancy at Birth, 2025
Women |████████████████████████████████████████████  85.6 years
Men   |███████████████████████████████████████        82.5 years

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), Livslängden i Sverige 2021–2025

Life expectancy in Sweden reached 85.6 years for women and 82.5 years for men in 2025, continuing a long climb that has added roughly eight and ten years respectively since 1970. Compared with just 2021, that is an increase of 0.7 years for women and a notably larger 1.3 years for men, meaning the traditional gap between the sexes has been narrowing. Averaged over the full 2021–2025 period to smooth out year-to-year noise, SCB puts life expectancy at 85.1 years for women and 81.8 years for men nationally.

One of the more striking findings in SCB’s latest life expectancy report is regional: Stockholm County has overtaken Halland County to record the highest life expectancy at birth of any Swedish county for both women and men, a change from the previous five-year period. Despite these gains, Sweden’s relative international standing has slipped somewhat, since life expectancy growth has been comparatively modest and several other countries have caught up or overtaken Sweden in recent years, even though Sweden’s figures remain high by global standards.

7. Immigration and Emigration Trends in Sweden 2026

Annual Immigration to Sweden
2024 |████████████████████████████████████   highest since 2019
2025 |███████████████████████████            under 90,000 (lowest since 2006*)

*excluding pandemic year 2020

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), The Future Population of Sweden 2026–2070

Immigration to Sweden dropped to under 90,000 people in 2025, the lowest level since 2006 if the pandemic-disrupted year of 2020 is excluded, a sharp pullback from 2024, when Ukrainian refugees registering under the EU’s mass flight directive pushed immigration to its highest level since 2019. Historically, immigration exceeding emigration has been the single biggest reason Sweden’s population keeps growing, more important than the balance of births and deaths, and SCB expects immigration to climb back toward around 80,000 people a year in the second half of the 2020s as current conditions normalise.

The clearest near-term disruption to this pattern comes in 2026 itself, when the temporary protection directive covering Ukrainian citizens is set to expire on 4 March 2026. SCB’s projections build in an expectation that a meaningful share of that population will leave Sweden as a result, contributing to an unusual projected population decline of around 20,000 people for the year, even though the agency notes this directive has been extended before and could plausibly be extended again. Emigration more broadly has also been running higher than in the past, partly reflecting administrative clean-up work by the Swedish Tax Agency to keep the national population register accurate.

8. Foreign Background and Country of Birth in Sweden 2026

Population by Background
Foreign background              |█████████████  24.9%
At least one parent born abroad |█████████████████  32.3%

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), Population by Foreign/Swedish Background

Sweden’s population has grown considerably more diverse over the past few decades, and the official figures capture that shift clearly. Today, 24.9% of the population has a foreign background, meaning they were either born outside Sweden or born in Sweden to two parents who were both born abroad, while a broader 32.3% have at least one parent born outside the country. As a benchmark, the foreign-born population reached 19.1%, or close to 1.96 million people, back in 2018, up 47% from 2010, and it has continued climbing since then.

The single most common foreign ancestry among Swedish residents remains Finnish, a reflection of the deep historical migration ties between the two Nordic neighbours. More recently, the Ukrainian population living in Sweden has grown tenfold during this century, almost entirely as a result of the war that began in 2022, illustrating how quickly a single geopolitical event can reshape the composition of a country’s foreign-born population, even in a country with generally slower and more gradual migration patterns.

9. Future Population Projections for Sweden 2026

Population Projection Milestones
2024   |███████████████████████████████           ~10.6 million
2034   |█████████████████████████████████         ~10.8 million (projected)
2070   |████████████████████████████████████████  11.8 million (projected)

Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), Sveriges Framtida Befolkning 2025–2070

Looking a decade ahead, SCB projects Sweden’s population will reach nearly 10.8 million by 2034, an increase of only 200,000 people, or 1.9%, over the full ten-year stretch, a far slower pace than the growth recorded over the previous decade. Stretching the horizon out to 2070, the same projection series puts Sweden’s population at 11.8 million, with the share of residents aged 80 and older climbing to 11% by that point, up from just over 6% today, as the country’s age structure continues tilting toward older residents.

Crucially, SCB’s projections assume that deaths will outnumber births in most years from here on, meaning growth becomes almost entirely dependent on immigration continuing to exceed emigration. Births are expected to keep declining until they bottom out at around 95,000 in 2028, before slowly recovering, while deaths are projected to keep rising as the large 1940s birth cohort reaches its late eighties and beyond. SCB revisits these long-term assumptions every three years, with the next full update due in 2027.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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