The European Union’s latest demographic projections incorporate sustained net immigration as a long-term response to falling birth rates, population ageing and a steadily contracting working-age population.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
European Union population projections now assume immigration will remain a significant factor in maintaining the bloc’s population and labor supply for decades as births continue to decline and Europe grows older.
The European Commission’s Demography Report 2026 describes a European Union facing a combination of historically low fertility, more deaths than births and an increasingly smaller share of residents of working age. Rather than projecting a return to replacement-level fertility, the demographic framework anticipates continued immigration alongside policies intended to increase employment and productivity.
JRC147518_01 by yourNEWS Media
The scale of the demographic shift is evident in the birth statistics. EU countries recorded 3.55 million births in 2024, down sharply from 6.8 million in 1964. The fertility rate has fallen to 1.34 children per woman, substantially below the estimated replacement level of 2.1 children per woman that would be needed to sustain a population over time in the absence of immigration.
Deaths have exceeded births throughout the European Union every year since 2012. As a result, years in which the bloc’s total population increased did so because net migration more than compensated for the natural population decline.
Migration figures from 2024 illustrate how large that demographic component has become. About 4.2 million immigrants entered EU countries from outside the bloc that year, while approximately 1.6 million people departed EU territory. By the beginning of 2025, 46.7 million residents living in the European Union had been born outside it, representing 10.4% of the bloc’s population.
The report does not separately forecast how the native-born European population will change over the coming decades. Its broader demographic figures, however, show the consequences of persistently low fertility combined with an ageing population: without enough births to replace older generations, demographic growth increasingly depends on migration.
That assumption is incorporated directly into Eurostat’s long-range modeling.
Under Eurostat’s central population scenario, immigration into the European Union is projected to exceed emigration every year through 2100. The model also links future immigration to losses within the working-age population, incorporating additional migration equivalent to 10% of each annual decline in the number of working-age residents.
The difference between projections with and without migration is substantial. Eurostat estimates that, absent net immigration, the European Union would have roughly 130 million fewer residents by 2100 than it would under the central scenario.
The demographic strategy outlined in the report consequently places considerable emphasis on maintaining the labor force through legal migration, increasing participation in employment and improving productivity as Europe’s population structure changes.
Legal migration is identified as one mechanism for responding to labor shortages. The approach includes recruitment arrangements with countries outside the European Union and a planned online system designed to connect European employers with foreign workers.
By comparison, the report presents Europe’s low birth rate as a difficult demographic condition for governments to reverse through public policy alone. Its assumptions do not depend on fertility returning to the 2.1 replacement level, meaning the projected population path is instead constructed around adaptation to continued low fertility.
That distinction has major implications for Europe’s demographic future. Policies that could make marriage, housing and child-rearing easier for younger Europeans are separate from the population assumptions used in the projections. The central scenario instead relies on a combination of net immigration, higher workforce participation and stronger productivity to soften the economic effects of fewer working-age Europeans.
The resulting model treats immigration not as a temporary response to a short-term labor shortage, but as an enduring component of the European Union’s demographic outlook. With births already running far below levels recorded six decades ago and deaths continuing to exceed births, continued migration is built into the projections used to estimate both Europe’s future population and the size of its workforce through the end of the century.
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