Austria's population is growing and getting older

2023-07-17 09:04:00

Households have gotten smaller. The population has ever higher educational qualifications, the most common formal educational qualification is the apprenticeship certificate.

While there used to be surveys using questionnaires, since 2011 the population census has been carried out by Statistics Austria as a register census – so only administrative data is used. From 2011 to 2021, the population increased by 6.7 percent from 8.4 million to almost nine million. On the reference date of the 2021 census, October 31, 2021, 8,969,068 people lived in Austria.

The average age of the population as of the 2021 census date was 43.2 years (2011: 41.8 years). The proportion of those over 65 has risen to almost one fifth (from 15.2 percent to 19.4 percent), while the proportion of those aged 15 to 64 has fallen to around two thirds (from 69.4 percent to 66, 2 percent). The proportion of those under the age of 15 also fell from 15.4 percent to 14.4 percent. “The trend of a growing and aging population in Austria will continue in the coming years,” said Statistics Austria Director General Tobias Thomas.

Trend towards smaller households

The proportion of people living in Austria whose place of birth was outside Austria was 20.4 percent (around 1.83 million) in 2021. In relation to the working-age population (between 15 and 64 years), the proportion of those born abroad was almost a quarter (24.8 percent; 2011: 18.6 percent).

The trend towards smaller households is also continuing: since the 2011 census, the number of private households has grown by 10.4 percent, significantly faster than the population in private households (6.7 percent). In 1961, less than half (46.7 percent) of households had only one or two people, by 2021 this was already the case in more than two thirds of all private households (68.7 percent). The proportion of one-person households has almost doubled from 19.7 percent in 1961 to 38.3 percent in 2021. The average household size has decreased continuously over the past decades, in 2021 it was 2.19 people (1961: 3.02 people).

As far as the education of the population is concerned, an apprenticeship is the most common formal qualification – 30.9 percent of people in Austria over the age of 15 had an apprenticeship in 2021. Of the approximately 1.18 million people with an academic degree, women (54.1 percent) were ahead.

285,000 “commuters” to Vienna

In general, Statistics Austria identifies a long-term trend towards higher formal qualifications in the course of education over the years and generations, with the greatest change being among women. Only 27.9 percent of women had only completed compulsory schooling in 2021, compared to 73 percent in 1971. At the same time, the proportion of women aged 15 and over who have college degrees has increased from 1 percent in 1971 to 16.3 percent a year increased in 2021. Among men, the proportion of people with a compulsory school degree fell from 48.9 percent (1971) to 20.8 percent (2021), while the proportion of university graduates rose from 3.5 percent to 14.4 percent.

Austrians are mobile when it comes to their place of work: every seventh employed person in Austria (almost 600,000 people) leaves their federal state of residence to pursue their profession. With almost 285,000 people, Vienna has the largest proportion of “commuters”. By the way, employees across Austria travel an average distance of 27 kilometers to reach their place of work, with employed Viennese commuting the shortest distance at around 17 kilometers, while those in Burgenland commute the furthest to their place of work at an average of 41 kilometers.

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