More than a quarter of Germany's population has an immigration background. In 2025, approximately 21.8 million people with a migration history lived in the country, according to the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden announced on Monday. This represented 26.3 percent of the total population and was 0.5 percentage points more than the previous year. People have an immigration background if either they themselves or both of their parents immigrated to Germany since 1950.
One-fifth of the population (19.8 percent) immigrated to Germany themselves during this period. This corresponds to 16.4 million people in 2025 and 281,000 more than in 2024. The number of immigrants thus increased significantly more slowly than in previous years. Thirty-nine percent of immigrants in 2025 came from Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, and Syria.
Among the 5.4 million people living in Germany in 2025 were direct descendants of immigrants - children born in Germany to two parents who immigrated since 1950. This corresponds to 6.5 percent of the population. Their number increased by 160,000 compared to 2024.
There has been a particularly large jump in migration over the past two decades. Since 2005, the number of people with an immigration background has risen from 13 million to 21.8 million in 2025. This was an increase of a total of 8.8 million or 67 percent.
Of these, around two-thirds (5.9 million) immigrated to Germany themselves and around one-third (2.9 million) are children of two immigrant parents. The share of the population with an immigration background in the total population increased by around ten percentage points between 2005 and 2025.
In the age group of 25 to 34-year-olds, more than one in three people had an immigration background in 2025 (36 percent). Among those over 65, it was only one in seven (14 percent).
Among young adults aged 25 to 34 who immigrated themselves, one-third (33 percent or 896,000) had an academic degree. This proportion was thus almost as high as in the total population of this age group. At the same time, 36 percent of younger immigrants and thus approximately one million had no vocational qualification whatsoever and were neither in education nor in training.
In 2025, a total of 56.8 million people without an immigration background lived in Germany, which was 0.9 percent or 488,000 fewer than the previous year. They had neither immigrated to Germany themselves since 1950 nor were they the child of at least one immigrant parent.
Those who do not count as part of the population with an immigration background include people where only one of the two parents immigrated. In 2025, this applied to 4.2 million people born in Germany or five percent of the population. The data comes from the 2025 Microcensus. This involves surveying approximately one percent of the population annually on a sample basis.
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