The population of Europe was estimated to be 745 million in 2024, an increase of around 4 million when compared with 2012. Over 35 years between 1950 and 1985, the population of Europe grew by approximately 157.8 million. But 35 years after 1985 it was estimated to have only increased by around 38.7 million. Since the 1960s, population growth in Europe has fallen quite significantly and was even negative during the mid-1990s. While population growth has increased slightly since the low of -0.07 percent in 1998, the growth rate for 2020 was just 0.04 percent. Which European country has the biggest population? As of 2024, the population of Russia was estimated to be approximately 144.8 million and was by far Europe's largest country in terms of population, with Turkey being the second-largest at over 87 million. While these two countries both have territory in Europe, however, they are both only partially in Europe, with the majority of their landmasses being in Asia. In terms of countries wholly located on the European continent, Germany had the highest population at 84.5 million, and was followed by the United Kingdom and France at 69.1 million and 66.5 million respectively. Characteristics of Europe's population There are approximately 384.6 million females in Europe, compared with 359.5 million males, a difference of around 25 million. In 1950, however, the male population has grown faster than the female one, with the male population growing by 104.7 million, and the female one by 93.6 million. As of 2024, the single year of age with the highest population was 37, at 10.6 million, while in the same year there were estimated to be around 136 thousand people aged 100 or over.

Throughout the Common Era, Western Europe's population development fluctuated greatly. The population was very similar at the beginning and end of the first millennium, at around 25 million people. The largest decline in this period occurred in the sixth century, due to the Plague of Justinian, which the source claims to have killed around one third of the continent's population (although recent studies dispute this). Similarly, the population fell by almost 17 million throughout the 14th century, due to the Black Death.

Improvements in agriculture and infrastructure then saw population growth increase once more from the 15th century onwards, before the onset of the demographic transition saw a population boom throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 2025, the population of Europe was estimated to be approximately 7.4 million, with the most common single year of age being 38, at over 10.6 million. By contrast, there were just 126,350 people aged 99 this year.

This dataset provides values for POPULATION reported in several countries. The data includes current values, previous releases, historical highs and record lows, release frequency, reported unit and currency.

The population of Europe decreased by approximately 0.1 percent in 2024, falling to an overall total of approximately 745 million people. Since 1961, Europe's population growth rate has never exceeded one percent, and was even declining in the late 1990s and between 2020 and 2023.

Graph and download economic data for Population Growth for the European Union (SPPOPGROWEUU) from 1961 to 2024 about EU, Europe, population, and rate.

The world's population first reached one billion people in 1805, and reached eight billion in 2022, and will peak at almost 10.2 billion by the end of the century. Although it took thousands of years to reach one billion people, it did so at the beginning of a phenomenon known as the demographic transition; from this point onwards, population growth has skyrocketed, and since the 1960s the population has increased by one billion people every 12 to 15 years. The demographic transition sees a sharp drop in mortality due to factors such as vaccination, sanitation, and improved food supply; the population boom that follows is due to increased survival rates among children and higher life expectancy among the general population; and fertility then drops in response to this population growth. Regional differences The demographic transition is a global phenomenon, but it has taken place at different times across the world. The industrialized countries of Europe and North America were the first to go through this process, followed by some states in the Western Pacific. Latin America's population then began growing at the turn of the 20th century, but the most significant period of global population growth occurred as Asia progressed in the late-1900s. As of the early 21st century, almost two-thirds of the world's population lives in Asia, although this is set to change significantly in the coming decades. Future growth The growth of Africa's population, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, will have the largest impact on global demographics in this century. From 2000 to 2100, it is expected that Africa's population will have increased by a factor of almost five. It overtook Europe in size in the late 1990s, and overtook the Americas a few years later. In contrast to Africa, Europe's population is now in decline, as birth rates are consistently below death rates in many countries, especially in the south and east, resulting in natural population decline. Similarly, the population of the Americas and Asia are expected to go into decline in the second half of this century, and only Oceania's population will still be growing alongside Africa. By 2100, the world's population will have over three billion more than today, with the vast majority of this concentrated in Africa. Demographers predict that climate change is exacerbating many of the challenges that currently hinder progress in Africa, such as political and food instability; if Africa's transition is prolonged, then it may result in further population growth that would place a strain on the region's resources, however, curbing this growth earlier would alleviate some of the pressure created by climate change.

Graph and download economic data for Population, Total for the European Union (SPPOPTOTLEUU) from 1960 to 2024 about EU, Europe, and population.

The number of persons having their usual residence in a country on 1 January of the respective year. When usually resident population is not available, countries may report legal or registered residents.

In 2024, Russia had the largest population among European countries at ***** million people. The next largest countries in terms of their population size were Turkey at **** million, Germany at **** million, the United Kingdom at **** million, and France at **** million. Europe is also home to some of the world’s smallest countries, such as the microstates of Liechtenstein and San Marino, with populations of ****** and ****** respectively. Europe’s largest economies Germany was Europe’s largest economy in 2023, with a Gross Domestic Product of around *** trillion Euros, while the UK and France are the second and third largest economies, at *** trillion and *** trillion euros respectively. Prior to the mid-2000s, Europe’s fourth-largest economy, Italy, had an economy that was of a similar sized to France and the UK, before diverging growth patterns saw the UK and France become far larger economies than Italy. Moscow and Istanbul the megacities of Europe Two cities on the eastern borders of Europe were Europe’s largest in 2023. The Turkish city of Istanbul, with a population of 15.8 million, and the Russian capital, Moscow, with a population of 12.7 million. Istanbul is arguably the world’s most famous transcontinental city with territory in both Europe and Asia and has been an important center for commerce and culture for over 2,000 years. Paris was the third largest European city with a population of ** million, with London being the fourth largest at *** million.

Actual value and historical data chart for European Union Population Total

Actual value and historical data chart for European Union Urban Population Percent Of Total

European Union Population: EU 27 excl UK: Female data was reported at 229,492.073 Person th in 2023. This records an increase from the previous number of 228,870.208 Person th for 2022. European Union Population: EU 27 excl UK: Female data is updated yearly, averaging 223,851.793 Person th from Dec 1984 (Median) to 2023, with 36 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 229,492.073 Person th in 2023 and a record low of 211,789.008 Person th in 1984. European Union Population: EU 27 excl UK: Female data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Eurostat. The data is categorized under Global Database’s European Union – Table EU.G002: Eurostat: Population: by Sex.

Context

Data containing education attainment level, also grouped by age group, sex and geography in Europe. Source is https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database (official European Data Source). Data is downloaded from the source, documented and uploaded to Kaggle.

Content

Original data

The original data is provided in TSV (tab delimited) format.

Data is grouped by sex, age group and geography. Education attainment is given by International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED11).

ISCED11 education levels are the following: X - No schooling
0 - Early childhood education
1 - Primary education
2 - Lower secondary education
3 - Upper secondary education
4 - Post-secondary non-tertiary education
5 - Short-cycle tertiary education
6 - Bachelor’s or equivalent level
7 - Master’s or equivalent level
8 - Doctoral or equivalent level
9 - Not elsewhere classified

Transformed data

For easiness of use, the original data was transformed using Starter Kernel: Population Education Levels in Europe in a csv format; if you want to replicate this process, you are welcome to fork this Kernel and implement your own data analysis.

How to

The data has the temporal information given as columns (per year). In order to further use this data, it would be more easy to pivot first these columns to get instead date/value pairs. This pivot operation can be done using melt from pandas is done in the starter kernel: * Starter Kernel: Population Education Levels in Europe; we convert the year to an integer. Just run this Kernel to put the data in csv format, with yearly data pivoted.

Acknowledgements

All merit for data collection, curation, and initial publishing goes to Eurostat.

Inspiration

You can use this data for various demographic, economic, public health, social aspects, combining with alternative data from Kaggle and other sources.

Actual value and historical data chart for European Union Population Ages 15 64 Total

Actual value and historical data chart for European Union Population Ages 20 24 Female Percent Of Female Population

Ratio between the annual average population and the land area. The land area concept (excluding inland waters, such as lakes, wide rivers, estuaries) should be used wherever available; if not available, then the total area (including inland waters) is used.

Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population sizes of medieval European cities, and comparative analyses of these data have shed much light on the long-term evolution of urban systems. However, the next step—to systematically relate the population size of these cities to their spatial and socioeconomic characteristics—has seldom been taken. This raises a series of interesting questions, as both modern and ancient cities have been observed to obey area-population relationships predicted by settlement scaling theory. To address these questions, we analyze a new dataset for the settled area and population of 173 European cities from the early fourteenth century to determine the relationship between population and settled area. To interpret this data, we develop two related models that lead to differing predictions regarding the quantitative form of the population-area relationship, depending on the level of social mixing present in these cities. Our empirical estimates of model parameters show a strong densification of cities with city population size, consistent with patterns in contemporary cities. Although social life in medieval Europe was orchestrated by hierarchical institutions (e.g., guilds, church, municipal organizations), our results show no statistically significant influence of these institutions on agglomeration effects. The similarities between the empirical patterns of settlement relating area to population observed here support the hypothesis that cities throughout history share common principles of organization that self-consistently relate their socioeconomic networks to structured urban spaces.

This line chart displays rural population (people) by date using the aggregation sum in Europe. The data is about countries per year.

European Union Population: EU 27 excl UK: Age 20 to 24 data was reported at 24,016.829 Person th in 2023. This records an increase from the previous number of 23,881.146 Person th for 2022. European Union Population: EU 27 excl UK: Age 20 to 24 data is updated yearly, averaging 26,569.403 Person th from Dec 2000 (Median) to 2023, with 24 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 29,377.961 Person th in 2000 and a record low of 23,792.976 Person th in 2021. European Union Population: EU 27 excl UK: Age 20 to 24 data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Eurostat. The data is categorized under Global Database’s European Union – Table EU.G001: Eurostat: Population.