In 2023, there were approximately 631,970 people living in Glasgow, with a further 523,250 people living in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, the first and second most-populated Scottish council areas respectively. The region of Fife is also heavily populated, with approximately 373,210 people living there. The least populated areas are the islands of Scotland such as Orkney, estimated to have only 22,000 people there.

Chart and table of population level and growth rate for the Edinburgh, UK metro area from 1950 to 2025. United Nations population projections are also included through the year 2035.

In 2020, there were estimated to be 406,000 non-British nationals living in Scotland. This represented about 8% of Scotland’s population. Of all non-British nationals, 61% were EU nationals (247,000) and 39% were non-EU nationals (159,000). Prior to 2010, the populations of EU and non-EU nationals living in Scotland were similar. Since 2010, the population of EU nationals has consistently been higher than the population of non-EU nationals. Polish was the most common non-British nationality in Scotland in 2020, with 92,000 nationals (23% of the total non-British population). The council areas with the largest proportion of residents with a non-British nationality were Aberdeen City (20%), City of Edinburgh (19%), and Glasgow City (12%).

This data is sourced from the Census 2011 and shows the population and population density by council area. Raw data sourced from http://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/en/censusresults/downloadablefiles.html and then manipulated in excel to merge a number of tables. The resulting data was joined to a shapefile of Scottish Council areas from sharegeo (http://www.sharegeo.ac.uk/handle/10672/305). Both sources should be attributed as the sources of the base data. GIS vector data. This dataset was first accessioned in the EDINA ShareGeo Open repository on 2012-12-19 and migrated to Edinburgh DataShare on 2017-02-21.

Dundee City's crime rate of 847 crimes per 10,000 people was the highest of any region of Scotland in 2023/24. The rate for the whole of Scotland was 550 per 10,000 people, which appears to be driven by low crime in places such as the Orkney and Shetland Islands, with almost all Scottish cities reporting higher than average crime rates. In Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, the crime rate was 812 crimes per 10,000 people, while in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, the crime rate was 679 per 10,000 population. Comparisons with the rest of the UK When compared with the rest of the United Kingdom, Scotland has experienced a noticeable decline in its overall crime rate. In 2008/09 for example, Scotland's crime rate was higher than that of England and Wales, as well as Northern Ireland, the other two jurisdictions in the UK. In 2022/23, however, Scotland's crime rate was the lowest in the UK, with the crime rate in England and Wales rising noticeably during the same period. Scotland's homicide rate has also fallen, from being the highest in the UK in 2002/03, to the lowest as of 2022/23. Theft and fraud drive recent crime uptick There was a slight increase in the number of crimes recorded by the Scottish police in 2023/24, when compared with the previous year. Although many other types of crimes declined during this reporting year, the number of theft offences has increased, reaching 111,054 offences in 2023/24. Fraud crime has also increased significantly in recent years, with 16,789 offences in 2022/23, compared with just 6,913 in 2014/15. The recent uptick in fraud and theft offences is also reflected in the jurisdiction England and Wales.

Orkney and Shetland, the population isolates which make up the Northern Isles of Scotland, are of particular interest to multiple sclerosis (MS) research. While MS prevalence is high in Scotland, Orkney has the highest global prevalence, higher than more northerly Shetland. Many hypotheses for the excess of MS cases in Orkney have been investigated, including vitamin D deficiency and homozygosity: neither was found to cause the high prevalence of MS. It is possible that this excess prevalence may be explained through unique genetics. We used polygenic risk scores (PRS) to look at the contribution of common risk variants to MS. Analyses were conducted using ORCADES (97/2118 cases/controls), VIKING (15/2000 cases/controls) and Generation Scotland (30/8708 cases/controls) datasets. However, no evidence of a difference in MS associated common variant frequencies was found between the three control populations, aside from HLA-DRB1*1501 tag SNP rs9271069. This SNP had a significantly higher risk allele frequency in Orkney (0.23, p-value = 8 x 10-13) and Shetland (0.21, p-value = 2.3 x 10-6) than mainland Scotland (0.17). This difference in frequency is estimated to account for 6 (95% CI 3, 8) out of 150 observed excess cases per 100,000 individuals in Shetland and 9 (95% CI 8, 11) of the observed 257 excess cases per 100,000 individuals in Orkney, compared with mainland Scotland. Common variants therefore appear to account for little of the excess burden of MS in the Northern Isles of Scotland.

According a walking and cycling survey in 2021, the majority of the population in Scottish cities reported to have walked one to eight times a week during the past seven days for the purpose of transport. Edinburgh and Glasgow had the highest share of residents who walked more than 13 times a week at a share of 22 and 23 percent, respectively, whereas Inverness had the highest share of residents that didn't walk at all in the previous seven days for the purpose of traveling at a rate of 25 percent.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

This study examined the migration patterns and motivations of recent graduates from Scottish higher education. Increasing the retention of these predominantly young people is important at a time when Scotland's population is both declining and ageing, and in light of the Scottish Executive's ambitions to attract and retain more highly qualified people. Scotland is very successful in retaining graduates who lived in Scotland prior to commencing their studies, but much less successful in retaining those who came to Scotland to study from elsewhere. Little is known, however, about graduates' motivations for making migration decisions. The study aimed to help fill this knowledge gap and inform future policy to improve the retention of these highly skilled people.

One particular cohort was investigated: year 2000 first degree graduates from the University of Edinburgh. Two phases of primary research were conducted, generating quantitative and qualitative data. A postal survey, conducted in 2005, established basic information on respondents' background, employment and migration history, primary motivations for migration, and perspectives on possible future migration, together with demographic and educational data. A stratified sample of 80 survey respondents were then interviewed, divided into four groups determined by whether or not they were domiciled in Scotland prior to attending university, and whether or not they were currently domiciled in Scotland. These interviews aimed to give a more detailed understanding of the relative influence of, and interaction between, economic and non-economic factors as reasons behind graduate migration decisions. Overall, the research aimed to identify the kind of graduates who choose to stay in or leave Scotland, and the reasons which underlie these decisions.

This dataset includes the quantitative survey data only; the qualitative interview data have not been deposited.


Main Topics:

Topics covered include respondents' migration history (primary place of residence during the three years before commencement of their undergraduate degree); their location at the time of the survey (summer 2005); their location approximately six months after graduation, in January 2001; any additional locations of residence (exceeding three months) between 2001 and 2005. Information concerning respondents' current employment status, and their status in 2001 was also collected, and on primary motivations for migration at the time of graduation, and the factors deemed important when making decisions about where to live and work at the time of the survey. For those not living in Scotland at the time of the survey, perspectives on possible future return migration to Scotland were recorded. In addition, demographic data (gender, age, marital status, dependent children, social class background, ethnicity) and educational data (type of school attended, subject area and class of degree, postgraduate qualifications obtained or being pursued) were also collected.

ArcGIS shapefile of 788 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 32 ancient counties of Scotland as given in the 1851 census. As such this represents the counties of Scotland as they were before the boundary changes caused by Inverness and Elgin County Boundaries Act, 1870 (33 & 34 Vict. c. 16) and the Local Government (Scotland) Act, 1889 (52 & 53 Vict. c. 50) which eliminated the anomalies caused by the existence of detached portions of counties.

These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.

The LDOES project investigated the dynamics of changing neighbourhood populations over two decades in Scotland. The project has substantive links with two other ESRC projects: AQMeN II Urban Segmentation (PI: Susan McVie, Edinburgh) and Dynamics of Ethnic Identity & Inequality (PI: James Nazroo, Manchester). The project identified a lack of available information on ethnic migration dynamics in inter-census years. The Registers of Scotland (RoS) property transactions data was used to address this deficit. The RoS data captures each and every property transaction in Scotland between 1990 and 2014 as well as the names of buyers and sellers. Additional work was done by the AQMeN team to impute the ethnicity and religion of buyers using the name-classification software Onomap. This deposit contains tables for annual ethnic and religious inflows into an area based on the names of property buyers. The aggregation is at the level of 2001 Scottish Datazones (each unit covers between 500 – 1000 residents). The Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN) Phase II is a Research Centre that aims to develop a dynamic and pioneering set of projects to improve our understanding of current social issues in the UK and provide policy makers and practitioners with the evidence to build a better future. Three principal cross-cutting research strands will exploit existing high-quality data resources: (1) Education and Social Stratification will focus on social class differences in entry to, progression in and attainment at tertiary education and how they affect individuals' labour market outcomes and their civic participation; (2) Crime and Victimisation will explore the dramatic change in crime rates in Scotland and other jurisdictions and examines the determinants and impact of criminal careers amongst populations of offenders; and (3) Urban Segmentation and Inequality which will create innovative new measures of social segmentation and combine these with cutting-edge longitudinal and sorting-model techniques to explore the causes of neighbourhood segmentation, household location choice and neighbourhood inequalities. Five additional projects will focus on the referendum on Scottish independence, location dynamics and ethnicity and exploiting existing datasets. The research will fed into training activities and knowledge exchange events aimed at boosting capacity in quantitative methods amongst the UK social science community. The original data was collected by Registers of Scotland. Registers of Scotland is the non-ministerial government department responsible for compiling and maintaining 18 public registers. These relate to land, property, and other legal documents. The data is a complete census of housing transactions in Scotland from 1990 - 2014. Additional work was done by the AQMeN II team to impute the ethnicity and religion of buyers based on name using onomap -- a commercial software for name based imputation (http://www.onomap.org/).

The UK censuses took place on 29th April 2001. They were run by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (NISRA), General Register Office for Scotland (GROS), and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for both England and Wales. The UK comprises the countries of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Statistics from the UK censuses help paint a picture of the nation and how we live. They provide a detailed snapshot of the population and its characteristics, and underpin funding allocation to provide public services.

Census Support provides digitised boundary datasets of the UK, available in many Geographic Information System (GIS) formats. Most of these data are available as Open data under OGL v3 license. Postcode directories are also available although some of these are restricted to members of the academic community under 'Special Conditions'.

There are many digitised boundaries available. The main group of boundaries correspond to the various levels of 2011, 2001, 1991, 1981 and 1971 census geography which are designed to be used for spatial visualisation and analysis of census statistics. Also available are historic boundaries created by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project, held at the UK Data Archive under GN 33288 Great Britain Historical Database, 1841-1939.