Overview
Key figures and core demographic trends for Belgium.
Population
11.9M
Fertility Rate
1.44
Life Expectancy
82.3y
GDP / capita
$60.8K
Pop. Growth
0.70%
Net Migration
32K
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Provisional fertility nowcast
Source: National Statistical Offices or Ministries of Health / Interior · compiled by @BirthGauge. Full nowcast table · provisional, may be revised.
YTD births (3 mo) +0.7% YoY
TFR 2024
1.44
TFR 2025
1.44
TFR 2026
1.44
Births YTD (3 mo)
26.6K
Rates per 1,000 people per year — not absolute birth or death counts. When the birth rate exceeds the death rate, natural increase is positive (before migration).
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Economy
National accounts and international trade.
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Exports & imports
International trade for Belgium — product exports and imports from OEC / BACI.
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Migration
Net migration, permits, and the foreign-born population of Belgium, plus where migrants come from and where the diaspora lives.
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First residence permits issued during the year to non-EU citizens for employment-related reasons, by citizenship of the permit holder. EU free-movement workers are not included. National administrative definitions of “employment” permits vary; figures are not identical to every country’s domestic “work permit” count. Eurostat table.
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OECD definition: unemployed share of the labour force among native-born vs foreign-born residents aged 15–64. National offices (e.g. Statistics Sweden) may publish slightly different figures for other age bands or months — we show the internationally comparable OECD series. Latest: native-born 4.6%, foreign-born 9.7% (2024).
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Residents of Belgium born in each country, 1 January 2025 · arrow shows change since 2015. Share = of all 2.4M born abroad.
Source: Eurostat (migr_pop3ctb), from Belgium's statistics office
Residents of Belgium holding each foreign citizenship, 1 January 2025 · arrow shows change since 2015. Share = of all 1.7M foreign citizens.
Source: Eurostat (migr_pop1ctz), from Belgium's statistics office
Largest foreign-born communities in Belgium by country of birth (2024) · arrow shows change since 2010. Modelled by the UN from older censuses and registers, so it can miss recent arrivals; the official counts above are newer.
Source: UN DESA International Migrant Stock 2024
Top destinations for people born in Belgium who now live abroad (2024) · arrow shows change since 2010.
Source: UN DESA International Migrant Stock 2024
Demography
Age structure, projections, and population composition.
That is 9% smaller than in 2025. The animation freezes the latest fertility rate. It is a model, not an official forecast. UN World Population Prospects 2024 medium is 11 million in 2100 — higher than this run (low 7.9 million, high 15 million). UN lets fertility change over the century and includes some migration; this run does not.
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- Men born in the country
- Men born abroad
- Women born in the country
- Women born abroad
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Mortality & longevity
Life expectancy, death rates and child mortality as far back as vital registration and historical reconstructions allow (from 1960), plus infant and maternal mortality.
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Pre-1960 life expectancy and long child-mortality series are from Our World in Data (Riley, Zijdeman et al., HMD, UN). Historic crude death rates cover countries in the Human Mortality Database only — Sweden from 1751, France from 1816, and so on. Crude rates are not age-standardized.
Health, education & infrastructure
Spending, capacity and attainment. Coverage is thinner than for demographic series — most figures come from periodic surveys rather than continuous registration.
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Society, housing & beliefs
Family, crime, housing and religion indicators.
Homicide rate
1.1
Divorce rate
2.0
Births outside marriage
50.0%
Home ownership
71.0%
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9per 1,000
2019
Only one year available — not enough points for a trend line.
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Crime by ancestry, origin & race
Official statistics where published · definitions differ by country.
See the full availability guide →
Belgium: only limited comparable crime-by-ancestry statistics. Some judicial / prison statistics by nationality; no Denmark-style ancestry conviction series. Foreign and national totals are in the Eurostat comparison on this page.
Share of persons held in prison with foreign citizenship. This is not a conviction-by-ancestry series.
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Why this country’s demographics matter
Age structure, fertility gaps, and migration change budgets and electorates. This is the constraint, not a manifesto.
National fertility, age structure, and migration set the size of the next workforce and the next electorate.
- Period TFR versus replacement (~2.1) is the first number — then who is having the children, if an official split exists.
- Neighbors on the same World Bank series are the “ah, they have X children” chart.
- 2040 workers are mostly already born; TFR shows up around 2060. Who works, retirement age, and migration move 2040.
- Family policy elsewhere (France, Hungary, Korea) has not returned a high-income country to replacement in recent decades.
The longer argument — pensions, schools, coalitions, and what migration does and does not offset — is on why birthrates matter. The case for a pronatal culture as the response is on what's the solution?. To turn this country’s series into a memo you can forward, open the briefing builder — generate a draft, write it yourself, then expand any paragraph.