STATEC: Luxembourg Heads Toward One Million Inhabitants by 2070

For decades, the line that Luxembourg would one day hit a million inhabitants felt like a thought experiment. STATEC's new long-range population projections, published in 2026, treat it as a baseline scenario.

The numbers

The country's population stood at around 691,000 at end-2025 and is projected at 687,448 for 1 July 2026. Looking ahead to 2070, STATEC's four scenarios cluster between 944,000 and 1.07 million inhabitants: 944,000 in Scenario 1, 966,000 in Scenario 2, 1,022,000 in Scenario 3, and 1,067,000 in Scenario 4. Three of the four cross the one-million threshold.

Migration is the entire story

The fertility rate in Luxembourg sits at 1.25 children per woman — well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Foreign-born women have higher fertility (1.41) than Luxembourgish women (1.12), but neither cohort sustains population growth on its own. The whole of Luxembourg's demographic momentum comes from migration. In 2024, 25,725 people arrived and 16,444 left, yielding a positive migration balance of 9,281 — close to the long-run trend.

That has structural implications. Without continued immigration, Luxembourg's population would shrink, age, and over time strain its pension and healthcare systems. With it, the country grows steadily and stays demographically young — but is also, in most of its city neighbourhoods, already majority foreign-born. The country's politics, its language policy, its housing market, and its cross-border arrangements all sit downstream of that fact.

The 25–60 spine

The 2025 age structure tilts toward working ages: 25- to 60-year-olds dominate the pyramid, the legacy of decades of inward migration of professionals into financial services, the EU institutions, and the broader services economy. That is favourable for tax revenues and growth in the short and medium term — and it is also a non-trivial part of why the country has been able to fund its generous social model.

What the scenarios test

STATEC's four scenarios vary by economic assumptions: rates of GDP growth, employment expansion, productivity, and consequently the level of inward migration the labour market can sustain. Slower growth produces a smaller population; faster growth produces a larger one. The interesting policy question is not which scenario is most likely but what infrastructure — housing, transport, schools, healthcare — Luxembourg needs to build now to make the higher scenarios livable rather than congested.

Today's housing crisis, IDEA Foundation's recent permanence-of-the-crisis report, the Franco-Luxembourg cross-border planning working group, and the steady tram extension programme all tie back to the same projection. Luxembourg is not deciding whether it grows; it is deciding whether it grows well.