Europe's population will begin to decline from 2029, migration not enough to reverse the trend

Eurostat’s EUROPOP2025 projections, covering the period 2025-2100, indicate that the European Union’s population will grow to a peak of 453.3 million inhabitants in 2029, before beginning a long-term decline, according to Percorsi di Secondo Welfare and Orticalab, both based on Eurostat EUROPOP2025 and the European Commission’s Demography Report 2026. The news currently comes from a single source (Eurostat EUROPOP2025, picked up by two outlets); no further independent confirmation is available.

The central figure in the projections concerns the weight of the migration component in Europe’s demographic scenario: in the absence of immigration, by the end of the century the Union’s inhabitants would be around 130 million fewer than in the baseline scenario — a decrease of about one third — with an elderly dependency ratio 12 percentage points higher. It is the same baseline scenario — that is, one including expected migration — that generates the 2029 peak followed by the decline.

Indicator	Value
EU population peak	453.3 million (2029)
Difference without migration by end of century	about one third less, -130 million
Average worker loss per year (2025-2050)	1.2 million
Share of Europeans in world population	from 5.4% (2025) to 3.4% (2100)

The Commission’s Demography Report 2026 estimates an average loss of 1.2 million workers per year between 2025 and 2050, a figure that measures the combined effect of ageing and falling birth rates on the workforce available in the Union. At the global level, the share of Europeans in the world population will fall from 5.4% in 2025 to 3.4% by 2100, a downsizing that the projections place over a span of nearly eighty years.

The limitation stated by the sources concerns precisely the predictive nature of the data: the figures for 2100 derive from a baseline scenario that includes assumptions about future migration flows, and the comparison with the scenario without migration serves to isolate the weight of this single variable relative to the other demographic components — birth rate and mortality — which remain subject to revision in subsequent editions of the Eurostat projections.