page_title: Sweden
section_title: Demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Sweden / Demographics
caption_attribution_description: Midsummer Möja 2010
context_page_description: Sweden, officially the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, Finland to the east, and is connected to Denmark in the southwest by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund Strait. At 450,295 square kilometres, Sweden is the largest country in Northern Europe, the third-largest country in the European Union and the fifth largest country in Europe by area. The capital city is Stockholm. Sweden has a total population of 10.3 million of which 2.6 million have a foreign background. Persons with foreign backgrounds are defined as persons who are foreign born, or born in Sweden with foreign born parents. It has a low population density of 25 inhabitants per square kilometre, with 1 437 persons per km² in localities. 87% of Swedes live in urban areas, which cover 1.5% of the entire land area. The highest concentration is in the central and southern half of the country.
  Sweden is part of the geographical area of Fennoscandia. The climate is in general mild for its northerly latitude due to significant maritime influence.
context_section_description: The total resident population of Sweden was 10,343,403 in March 2020. The population exceeded 10 million for the first time on Friday 20 January 2017. Every fourth (24.9%) resident in the country has immigrant background and every third (32.3%) has at least one parent born abroad.
  The average population density is just over 25 people per km² (65 per square mile), with 1 437 persons per km² in localities (continuous settlement with at least 200 inhabitants). 87% of the population live in urban areas, which cover 1.5% of the entire land area. 63% of Swedes are in large urban areas. It is substantially higher in the south than in the north. The capital city Stockholm has a municipal population of about 950,000 (with 1.5 million in the urban area and 2.3 million in the metropolitan area). The second- and third-largest cities are Gothenburg and Malmö. Greater Gothenburg counts just over a million inhabitants and the same goes for the western part of Scania, along the Öresund. The Öresund Region, the Danish-Swedish cross-border region around the Öresund that Malmö is part of, has a population of 4 million. Outside of major cities, areas with notably higher population density include the agricultural part of Östergötland, the western coast, the area around Lake Mälaren and the agricultural area around Uppsala.
  Norrland, which covers approximately 60% of the Swedish territory, has a very low population density (below 5 people per square kilometre). The mountains and most of the remote coastal areas are almost unpopulated. Low population density exists also in large parts of western Svealand, as well as southern and central Småland. An area known as Finnveden, which is located in the south-west of Småland, and mainly below the 57th parallel, can also be considered as almost empty of people.
  Between 1820 and 1930, approximately 1.3 million Swedes, a third of the country's population at the time, emigrated to North America, and most of them to the United States. There are more than 4.4 million Swedish Americans according to a 2006 US Census Bureau estimate. In Canada, the community of Swedish ancestry is 330,000 strong.
  There are no official statistics on ethnicity, but according to Statistics Sweden, around 3,311,312 (32.3%) inhabitants of Sweden were of a foreign background in 2018, defined as being born abroad or born in Sweden with at least one parent born abroad. The most common countries of origin were Syria (1.82%), Finland (1.45%), Iraq (1.41%), Poland (0.91%), Iran (0.76%) and Somalia (0.67%). Sweden subsequently has one of the oldest populations in the world, with the average age of 41.1 years.
caption: Swedes celebrating Midsummer (Swedish: Midsommar)
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