Demographics of Iceland: Population, Immigration and Religion

Iceland had 394,324 residents on 1 January 2026, and roughly one in five of them was born abroad. This Guide to Iceland study pulls together the latest figures from Statistics Iceland to show who lives in Iceland today, where they live, how old they are, where the newcomers come from and what they believe.

The country added about 94,000 people in 20 years, and immigrants account for most of that growth. That makes Iceland one of the fastest-changing populations in Europe.

The religion section goes further than the official registry. We estimated the religious make-up of the population nationality by nationality, because a Polish Catholic and a Syrian Muslim who never registered with a religious group look identical in a membership count.

Iceland in numbers

How has Iceland's population grown?

Iceland's population grew 41% between 2000 and 2026, from 279,049 to 394,324. For most of its history the country barely grew at all.

The first full census in 1703 counted 50,358 people. A smallpox epidemic in 1707 and the Laki eruption famine of 1783 to 1785 (Móðuharðindin) kept the population below that level for most of the next 120 years. It only passed 1703's count for good in 1826.

Laki was the worst single blow in Iceland's long history of eruptions. Its ash and fluorine poisoning killed about 80% of the sheep and half the cattle and horses. The famine that followed cut the population from 49,753 in 1784 to 39,190 in 1787, a loss of 21%.

Growth only took off after 1900 with urbanisation, a motorised fishing fleet and falling infant mortality. The 100,000 mark fell in 1925, 200,000 in 1968 and 300,000 in 2006. The history of Iceland explains how a poor farming society became one of the richest countries in Europe in a single century.

What drives population growth in Iceland today?

Migration, not births, now drives Iceland's growth. In the 1990s natural increase (births minus deaths) added about 3,000 people a year. Today it adds about 1,700, while net migration has added between 2,000 and 8,700 a year since 2016.

The 2008 banking collapse is the only recent dip. Around 8,000 more people left than arrived in 2009 to 2011, most of them foreign workers going home and Icelanders moving to Norway. The 2010 figure also includes a register clean-up of 6,543 people who had left without reporting it. Our study of the economy of Iceland covers the crash itself and the tourism boom that followed.

In 2024 Statistics Iceland changed how it counts residents, removing people who were still on the register but no longer lived in the country. The revision cut the 1 January 2024 figure from 398,971 to 383,726, a drop of 15,245. Older headlines quoting close to 400,000 residents in 2024 are overstated.

Where do people live in Iceland?

Two in three people in Iceland live in the capital region around Reykjavík, and about four in five live within two hours' drive of the city. The rest of the country, an area larger than Portugal, holds about 140,000 people.

The fastest growth sits along the airport-to-Selfoss corridor. Reykjanes, home to Keflavík International Airport, grew 89% since 1998, and Selfoss nearly doubled in 20 years, from 5,702 to 11,000.

The Westfjords and the Northwest are the only regions smaller today than in 1998. Both have stabilised since 2016 as immigrants took jobs in fish processing and aquaculture.

What are the largest towns in Iceland?

Outside the capital region, Reykjanes and Selfoss, Akureyri is the only town with more than 10,000 people. Ísafjörður (2,807) and Egilsstaðir (2,719) are the largest towns in the Westfjords and the East.

Grindavík shows how quickly a town can empty. After the November 2023 evacuation for the Sundhnúkur eruptions, its registered population fell from 3,579 in 2024 to 819 in 2026.

Where do foreign citizens live in Iceland?

Foreign citizens make up 17.9% of the country, but the share swings from 5% to 63% by municipality. Tourism and farming areas in the south have the highest shares; rural districts in the north have the lowest.

Vík is the only municipality in Iceland where Icelandic citizens are a minority. Its hotels, restaurants and tour companies along the Ring Road depend on seasonal workers from Poland, the Baltics and Southern Europe.

How old is Iceland's population?

Iceland is still young by European standards, but it is ageing fast. The mean age rose from 34.6 in 2000 to 39.2 in 2026, and the share of people aged 65 and over nearly doubled since 1971.

The EU average share of people aged 65+ is about 22%, so Iceland remains one of the youngest countries in Europe. Immigration explains much of that: most newcomers arrive in their 20s and 30s.

Are there more men or women in Iceland?

Iceland has 202,181 men, 191,927 women and 216 people registered as non-binary (1 January 2026). That is 1,053 men per 1,000 women, one of the most male-skewed ratios in Europe.

Icelandic citizens are almost exactly balanced (162,379 men, 161,196 women). The gap comes from foreign citizens, 56% of whom are men, because construction, fishing and tourism recruit more men. Iceland still tops most rankings for gender equality.

How many babies are born in Iceland?

Iceland recorded 4,387 births in 2025, fewer than in 1960 (4,916), when the population was less than half its current size.

The total fertility rate fell to 1.56 children per woman in 2024 and 2025, the lowest since records began in 1853. It sat near replacement level (2.1) for most of 1990 to 2012, which set Iceland apart from the rest of Europe.

The drop since 2015 is steep. Women with Icelandic citizenship now average 1.78 children, women with foreign citizenship 1.09.

Parents are also older. The mean age of first-time mothers rose from 22.1 in 1981 to 29.2 in 2025. Two in three babies (2,860 of 4,387 in 2025) are born to unmarried mothers, one of the highest shares in Europe, though many of them have parents who live together.

What is the life expectancy in Iceland?

A boy born in Iceland in 2025 can expect to live 81.0 years and a girl 84.2 years, up from 71.6 and 77.5 in 1971 to 1975. The gap between men and women shrank from 5.9 years to 3.2. A 65-year-old today can expect another 19.5 years (men) or 21.3 years (women).

How many immigrants live in Iceland?

Iceland had 70,555 foreign citizens on 1 January 2026, almost ten times the 7,271 living here in 2000. For half a century the foreign share hovered around 2%.

The share climbed in two waves: the pre-crash construction boom of 2005 to 2008, and the tourism boom that started in 2016 and never fully stopped.

Iceland's European Economic Area membership explains most of it. Citizens of EEA countries can move to Iceland and work without a permit, and seven in ten foreign citizens (about 49,200) come from EEA countries. Most of the rest arrived as refugees, on work permits in sectors with labour shortages, or as family members. Our guides on how to move to Iceland and how to find a job in Iceland cover the practical side, and our economy of Iceland study shows the jobs, wages and industries that draw newcomers.

What is the difference between immigrants and foreign citizens?

Statistics Iceland publishes several measures, and they answer different questions.

The immigrant count exceeds the foreign-citizen count because about 17,800 foreigners have taken Icelandic citizenship since 1991. The largest groups of new citizens were former Polish (3,651), Filipino (1,687), Thai (1,126) and Vietnamese (862) nationals. Naturalisations hit a record 1,085 in 2025.

Only 279,639 residents, 70.9% of the population, were born in Iceland to two Iceland-born parents.

Where do immigrants in Iceland come from?

Poland, by a wide margin. Poles make up one in three foreign citizens and 5.9% of everyone living in Iceland, which makes Polish the country's second language in practice.

The table below covers the 20 largest foreign nationalities. The last column counts immigrants born in each country, including those who have since taken Icelandic citizenship.

Where the country-of-birth figure is much higher than the citizenship figure (Filipinos, Vietnamese, Thais, Americans, British), many immigrants have naturalised. Where it is lower (Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Lithuanians), many citizens were born elsewhere, often in Latin America or in Iceland itself.

Which refugee communities live in Iceland?

Three groups barely existed a decade ago. Ukrainians grew from 150 to 4,636 after Russia's 2022 invasion, when Iceland granted collective temporary protection. Venezuelans went from 7 to 1,931 after Iceland granted humanitarian protection to most Venezuelan applicants between 2018 and 2023.

Palestinians grew from 10 to 926, largely through family reunification from Gaza since 2023. Syrians (696), Afghans (472), Iraqis (415) and Somalis (292) are smaller refugee communities.

How many people move to and from Iceland each year?

In 2025, 18,674 people moved to Iceland and 15,507 left. Icelandic citizens have left in net terms in six of the last eight years (−345 in 2025); foreign citizens have arrived in net terms every year since 2011.

Turnover among foreign citizens is high. For every four foreigners who arrived in 2025, three left (14,073 in, 10,561 out), so the resident foreign population is younger and more transient than the headline number suggests.

How many Icelanders live abroad?

51,853 Icelandic citizens were registered as living abroad on 1 December 2025, equal to one in six Icelandic citizens living at home. Six in ten of them live in the other Nordic countries, where Icelanders can study, work and claim benefits on the same terms as locals.

Denmark is the usual first stop, mostly for university. In 2025, 1,997 Icelandic citizens moved to Denmark and 1,502 moved back, the largest two-way flow of Icelandic citizens with any country. Sweden and Norway follow. Norway was the main destination after the 2008 crash, when jobs in Iceland dried up.

Who were the Vesturfarar?

Iceland's largest emigration happened between 1870 and 1914, when volcanic ash, cold years and land shortages pushed an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people, around a fifth of the population, to North America. Most settled in Manitoba, where they founded New Iceland on the shore of Lake Winnipeg in 1875, with Gimli as its centre.

Canada's 2016 census counted 101,795 people with Icelandic ancestry, a quarter of Iceland's own population, but only 1,440 who spoke Icelandic as a mother tongue.

What religion are people in Iceland?

About four in five people living in Iceland have a Christian background, but only a quarter of Icelanders say they believe in a personal God. Iceland's official religion figures hide a second gap: one in five residents has no registered religion at all, and most of them are immigrants whose faith the registry never recorded.

What does the religious registry say?

Every resident is listed in the national register with a religious or life-stance organisation, or none. On 1 January 2026:

The National Church's share fell 32 percentage points in 26 years, from 88.7% to 56.3%, and it has lost members in absolute terms too (247,420 in 2000). Its most famous building, Hallgrímskirkja, is still Reykjavík's landmark, and our guide to churches in Iceland covers the rest.

The Ásatrú Association, which revived the worship of the Norse gods in 1972, is now the largest non-Christian religious organisation in the country. Zuism, a protest group that promised to refund parish fees, had about 3,000 members in 2016 and is now gone from the registry.

Membership has money attached. The state pays a parish fee (sóknargjald) out of general taxes to each organisation for every registered member aged 16 and over, so registration is closer to a tax choice than a statement of faith.

Why does the registry undercount immigrants' religion?

The "not specified" group grew from 5,094 in 2000 to 81,593 in 2026, almost exactly in step with immigration. People who move to Iceland are registered without a religion unless they sign up themselves, and most never do.

A Polish Catholic, a Romanian Orthodox and a Syrian Muslim all show up as "not specified". So the registry tells you how Icelanders pay their parish fees, not what the population believes.

What is the religious make-up of Iceland by nationality?

To get closer to the real picture, Guide to Iceland estimated each resident's likely religious background from their country of birth, then combined that with the registry for people of Icelandic background. The methodology section below explains the steps.

Here is the full estimate next to registered membership. Every group except Norse paganism is larger than its registry count, because most immigrants never sign up with a religious organisation.

Three findings stand out.

1. Catholicism is Iceland's second religion by a wide margin. Around 48,600 residents come from Catholic backgrounds, three times the Catholic Church's registered 15,558. Polish-born immigrants alone account for about 20,000 of them, with Lithuanians, Filipinos, Venezuelans, Portuguese and Spaniards making up most of the rest.
2. Orthodox Christians are ten times more numerous than the registry shows. About 13,700 residents come from Orthodox countries, led by Ukrainian-born (about 3,400) and Romanian-born (about 2,900) immigrants. Only 1,293 belong to a registered Orthodox parish in Iceland.
3. Islam is Iceland's largest non-Christian religion. About 9,700 residents come from Muslim backgrounds, four to five times the 2,139 registered in Muslim organisations. Immigrants from Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco and Albania make up just over half of that number, followed by Nigeria, Somalia, Kosovo and Turkey.

The estimate measures religious background, not practice. Many immigrants are less religious than the average person in their home country, just as many members of the National Church never attend. If immigrants were 25% less likely to be Christian than their home country's average, the Christian share would drop to about 77% and the no-religion share would rise to about 18%.

What religion are Iceland's largest immigrant groups?

Iceland's two biggest immigrant groups sit on opposite sides of Europe's old religious divide: Poles and Lithuanians are overwhelmingly Catholic, while Ukrainians and Romanians are mostly Orthodox.

Total religious shares per country come from the Pew Research Center 2020 estimates. The Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant split within each country's Christians is our own approximation of the country's main traditions. "Other religion" for Thailand and Vietnam is mostly Buddhism and folk religion.

What do Icelanders actually believe?

Registration and background say little about belief. In a 2018 Maskína survey, 54% of Icelanders said they believed in God, falling to about 32% among 18 to 29-year-olds. In the same survey, about 31% said they believed in elves or hidden people, a thread that runs through Icelandic folklore.

A 2023 survey led by folklorist Terry Gunnell found only 25% believed in "a loving God whom we can pray to", down from 45% in 2006 to 2007 (Heimildin). On belief rather than background, Iceland is one of the most secular countries in the world.

What languages are spoken in Iceland?

Icelandic is the national language and the mother tongue of about three in four residents. Icelandic has changed so little since the settlement that Icelanders can still read the 13th-century sagas in the original. A language committee coins Icelandic words for new things (a computer is tölva, a blend of "number" and "prophetess") instead of borrowing English ones.

Polish is the second language in practice, spoken at home by at least 23,000 Polish citizens and their children. Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Latvian, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese each have communities in the thousands.

English is the working language of tourism and much of construction, and most Icelanders under 60 speak it well, so many newcomers never need Icelandic at work. How to get immigrants learning Icelandic has become one of the country's main integration debates.

How do Icelandic names work?

Most Icelanders have no family name. A child's last name is formed from the father's or mother's first name plus -son (son) or -dóttir (daughter), so Jón's children might be Guðrún Jónsdóttir and Einar Jónsson. Since 2019 people registered as non-binary can use the suffix -bur (child). Icelanders use first names in all settings, and the phone book is sorted by first name. Our guide to Icelandic names answers the most common questions.

New first names need the approval of the Personal Names Committee (Mannanafnanefnd), which checks that a name fits Icelandic grammar and spelling. The most common names reflect a thousand years of continuity.

Source: Statistics Iceland, first names on 1 January 2023.

Where are Icelanders descended from?

Iceland was settled between about 870 and 930 by Norse chieftains from western Norway and the people they brought with them, many of them Gaelic slaves and wives taken from Ireland and Scotland. You can see the remains of one of the first farms at the Settlement Exhibition in Reykjavík.

Ancient DNA from 25 early settlers shows their ancestry was 57% Norse and 43% Gaelic (Ebenesersdóttir et al., Science, 2018). Modern Icelanders of old Icelandic stock are about 70% Norse, mainly because the Gaelic settlers, many of them enslaved, had fewer surviving children, with later Danish immigration adding to the Norse share.

For 1,000 years the population stayed small and isolated, which makes Iceland one of the best-documented gene pools in the world. The Íslendingabók genealogy database traces most living Icelanders back through church and census records, and the country has an app that warns two people if they are closely related before they date. That homogeneity is now changing faster than at any point since the settlement: 27% of residents have at least one parent born abroad. For more on the national character, read what makes an Icelander.