Demographics of France

The demography of France is monitored by the Institut national d'études démographiques (INED) and the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE). As of 1 January 2025, 66,352,000 people lived in Metropolitan France, while 2,254,000 lived in overseas France, for a total of 68,606,000 inhabitants in the French Republic. In January 2022, the population of France officially reached the 68,000,000 mark. In the 2010s and until 2017, the population of France grew by 1 million people every three years - an average annual increase of 340,000 people, or +0.6%.

France was historically Europe's most populous country. During the Middle Ages, more than one-quarter of Europe's total population was French; by the seventeenth century, this had decreased slightly to one-fifth. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, other European countries, such as Germany and Russia, had caught up with France and overtaken it in number of people. The country's population sharply increased with the baby boom following World War II, as it did in other European countries.

According to INSEE, from the year 2004, 200,000 immigrants entered the country annually. One out of two was born in Europe and one in three in Africa. Between 2009 and 2012, the number of Europeans migrating to France increased sharply (an annual increase of 12%), but this percentage decreased steadily until 2022, supplanted by a rise in the number of immigrants from Africa.

The national birth rate, after dropping for a time, began to rebound in the 1990s, and the country's fertility rate was close to the replacement level until about 2014. According to a 2006 INSEE study, the natural increase was close to 300,000 people a year, a level that had "not been reached in more than thirty years." With a total fertility rate of 1.59 (for France métropolitaine) in 2024, France remains one of the above-average fertile countries in the European Union, but it is now far from the replacement level.

In 2021, the total fertility rate (TFR) of France was 1.82, and 7.7% was the percentage of births, where this was a women's 4th or more child.

Among the 802,000 babies born in metropolitan France in 2010, 80.1% had two French parents, 13.3% had one French parent, and 6.6% had two non-French parents.

Between 2006 and 2008, about 22% of newborns in France had at least one foreign-born grandparent (9% born in another European country, 8% born in the Maghreb and 2% born in another region of the world). Censuses on race and ethnic origin were banned by the French government in 1978.