Country-by-country: what’s the age and sex profile of immigrant populations?
An interactive tool to explore the demographic profile of immigrant and native-born populations across countries.
November 9, 2026
The age and sex profile of immigrants often differs from that of the native-born population, and this can vary from country to country. This interactive population pyramid lets you compare the two.
The blue (men) and red (women) bars show the demographic profile of the immigrant population living in the chosen country. This is stacked by age, with the youngest at the bottom and the oldest at the top. By default, they show each group’s share of the total immigrant population.
The black line shows the native-born population for comparison.
In most countries, immigrants tend to be younger than the average person in the country they’re moving to, often because they’ve come to work or study. So the bars tend to be wider in the middle, and narrower at the bottom and top.
You can change the country using the dropdown. You can also switch to the number of immigrants in each sex or age group, turn off the native-born comparison, or see how things have changed over time.
A note on methodology
This data comes from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA). It typically publishes a new release of its World Population Prospects every two years. The last one was published in 2024.
Unfortunately, that release did not provide sex and age profiles of immigrant populations, as it had in previous versions. Here, we therefore have to rely on data from its 2022 release instead. Its next report is expected in 2027; if it has immigrant demographic data, we will update this visualization accordingly.
In its dataset, the UN defines an immigrant as someone who lives in a different country from the one in which they were born. So, it’s based on birthplace, not citizenship. However, for any countries where place of birth data is not available, they do have to rely on our measures, such as citizenship.
The data is based on the total number of people living in another country, not the flow of migrants each year.
Contributors & acknowledgements
By Hannah Ritchie and Sophia Mersmann.
Hannah Ritchie conceptualized the project, prepared the data, and built initial prototypes of the visualization. Sophia Mersmann built and designed the final visualization.
Many thanks to Edouard Mathieu for feedback and suggestions on this article.
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Hannah Ritchie and Sophia Mersmann (2026) - “Country-by-country: what’s the age and sex profile of immigrant populations?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/country-by-country-whats-the-age-and-sex-profile-of-immigrant-populations' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-country-by-country-whats-the-age-and-sex-profile-of-immigrant-populations,
author = {Hannah Ritchie and Sophia Mersmann},
title = {Country-by-country: what’s the age and sex profile of immigrant populations?},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2026},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/country-by-country-whats-the-age-and-sex-profile-of-immigrant-populations}
}
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