section_path: Demographics/Population
section_name: Population
paragraph_text: Population
  
  In May 2025, the population of Denmark, as registered by Statistics Denmark, was 6 million. Denmark has one of the oldest populations in the world, with the average age of 42.2 years, with 0.99 males per female. Despite a low birth rate of 11.3 births per 1000 population, the population is growing at an average annual rate of 0.44% because of net immigration and increasing longevity. The World Happiness Report frequently ranks Denmark's population as the happiest in the world. This has been attributed to the country's highly regarded education and health care systems, and its low level of income inequality. People in Denmark feel responsible for social welfare. The rate of taxation is among the world's highest and can be half a Dane's income but they get most healthcare free, university tuition is also free and students get grants, there is subsidized child care and old people get pensions and care helpers.
  
  Denmark is a historically homogeneous nation. However, as with its Scandinavian neighbours, Denmark has recently transformed from a nation of net emigration, up until World War II, to a nation of net immigration. Today, residence permits are issued mostly to immigrants from other EU countries (54% of all non-Scandinavian immigrants in 2017). Another 31% of residence permits were study- or work-related, 4% were issued to asylum seekers and 10% to persons who arrive as family dependants. Overall, the net migration rate in 2017 was 2.1 migrant(s)/1,000 population, somewhat lower than the United Kingdom and the other Nordic countries.
  
  There are no official statistics on ethnic groups, but according to 2020 figures from Statistics Denmark, 86.1% of the population in Denmark was of Danish descent (including Faroese and Greenlandic), defined as having at least one parent who was born in the Kingdom of Denmark and holds Danish nationality. The remaining 13.89% were of foreign background, defined as immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants. With the same definition, the most common countries of origin were Turkey, Poland, Syria, Germany, Iraq, Romania, Lebanon, Pakistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Somalia. Minorities in Denmark include Turks, Poles, Syrians, Germans, Iraqis, Romanians and people from former Yugoslavia. There are also other Asian and African populations in the country. Small numbers of Romani people and Hungarians live in Denmark. There is also a small Jewish population.
  
  The Inuit are Indigenous to Greenland in the Kingdom and have traditionally inhabited Greenland and the northern parts of Canada and Alaska in the Arctic. From the 18th century up to the 1970s, the Danish government (Dano-Norwegian until 1814) tried to assimilate the Greenlandic Inuit, encouraging them to adopt the majority language and culture. Because of this "Danization process", some persons of Inuit ancestry now identify their mother tongue as Danish.