The Share of People in Malta Without Maltese Citizenship Has Quadrupled

Nearly three in ten people in Malta

On 1 January 2025, 168,938 of the 574,250 people living in Malta were not Maltese citizens. That is 29.4% of the resident population, a share Silver Data Lab derives from two counts Eurostat publishes. On 1 January 2014 the figures were 29,291 out of 428,156, or 6.8%. The share has more than quadrupled, and its rise of 22.6 percentage points is three times Austria's 7.5, the second largest among the 26 Member States with values for both years. No value in Malta's series carries a flag, so neither a break in the series nor an estimate stands behind the comparison.

Over those eleven years Malta's population grew by 146,094 and the number of its residents without Maltese citizenship by 139,647, both differences derived from the published counts: the second is almost as large as the first.

The climb was not even. The share reached 18.4% in 2019 and 21.7% in 2020, barely moved in 2021, at 21.8%, and rose again in each of the four years after, to 29.4%. Eurostat's split by group of citizenship starts for Malta in 2021, and it shows where the recent rise sits: citizens of countries outside the EU went from 14.3% of Malta's residents that year to 21.4% in 2025, while citizens of other Member States went from 7.5% to 8.0%. Malta's 21.4% is the highest share of non-EU citizens among the 26 Member States.

What the share counts

Eurostat counts the people usually resident in a country on 1 January who do not hold its citizenship: citizens of other EU Member States, citizens of countries outside the Union and stateless people. It publishes the count as a number of persons, and a number mostly measures how large a country is: Germany's 12,392,275 is the largest, against 168,938 in Malta. So this study divides each count by the country's total resident population on the same date, taken from the Eurostat dataset that count is drawn from, and every share on this page is derived in that way.

Citizenship is a legal status, not a record of where a person was born or when they arrived. Someone who moved to a country and later became its citizen leaves the count. A child born in the country can be in it, if that country's law does not make the child a citizen at birth. Those rules are national, so part of the distance between two countries comes from their citizenship law rather than from who lives there. Eurostat publishes a separate count of people born abroad, a different population that this study does not use; this site's study of the employment gap of people born outside the EU classifies by birth in that way.

From Luxembourg to Poland

Luxembourg stands far ahead of every other Member State: 47.0% of its residents are not Luxembourg citizens, close to one in two. Malta follows at 29.4% and Cyprus at 24.8%, then Austria at 20.0%, one resident in five, Estonia at 17.9% and Ireland at 16.1%. Germany records 14.8%, Spain 14.1%, Belgium 14.0%, Latvia 12.3%, Denmark 11.3% and Slovenia 10.1%. That makes twelve Member States in which at least one resident in ten lacks the country's citizenship, against eight in 2014.

France, at 9.4% on provisional figures, Italy at 9.1%, Czechia at 9.0% and the Netherlands at 8.9% sit in the middle of the ranking, with Sweden at 7.8%, Finland at 7.3%, Greece at 7.1% and Lithuania at 5.2% below them.

Six Member States are under 5%, all of them in central and eastern Europe: Croatia at 4.0%, Hungary at 2.7%, Bulgaria at 2.3%, Romania at 1.9%, a value Eurostat marks as estimated, Slovakia at 1.2% and Poland at 1.2%, where the count is estimated and provisional. Poland's share is the lower of the last two, by less than a tenth of a point.

Portugal is the one Member State absent from the ranking. Eurostat has published its total population on 1 January 2025 but no count of its residents by citizenship.

Citizens of another EU country, or of the rest of the world

Eurostat also divides the count between citizens of another Member State and citizens of countries outside the Union, and the division changes how the top of the ranking reads. In Luxembourg, 244,291 of the 320,608 residents without its citizenship, or 76.2%, are citizens of another Member State. They alone make up 35.8% of Luxembourg's population, a derived share above the whole of Malta's. Citizens of other EU countries are also the larger group in Slovakia, at 60.8% of residents without Slovak citizenship, in Belgium, at 60.3%, and in Austria, where they number 923,854 against 909,689 citizens of non-EU countries, 50.2% of the total. In the other 22 Member States with a 2025 value, citizens of non-EU countries are the larger group.

In Luxembourg the mix is shifting inside a share that hardly moves. From 2017, the year its series breaks, to 2025 the total went from 47.6% to 47.0%, while citizens of other Member States fell from 39.6% of residents to 35.8% and citizens of non-EU countries rose from 7.9% to 11.2%.

The other extreme of the split is in the Baltic States. In Latvia the non-EU group makes up 98.2% of residents without Latvian citizenship, and in Estonia 90.8% of those without Estonian citizenship. In both, that group takes in people Eurostat classifies as recognised non-citizens: people who are citizens neither of the country they live in nor of any other, but who have established ties to it carrying some of the rights and obligations of its citizens. Eurostat describes them as mainly former Soviet citizens living in the Baltic States who have not applied for the citizenship of the country where they live.

A rise in nearly every Member State

Between 1 January 2014 and 1 January 2025 the share rose in 24 of the 26 Member States. Five of those rises cross a break in the series, in Luxembourg, Italy, Czechia, Croatia and Germany, whose years are listed under the limitations below. After Malta and Austria, Germany recorded the third largest rise, 6.1 points, from 8.7% to 14.8%, though its series breaks in 2023. Slovenia's share more than doubled, from 4.7% to 10.1%, and Cyprus's rose from 19.5% to 24.8%.

Several of the steepest increases in proportion started from very low levels. Lithuania's share went from 0.7% to 5.2%, more than seven times its 2014 level, with no flag anywhere in its series; the largest single step came between 2022 and 2023, from 1.2% to 3.4%. Croatia's went from 0.6% to 4.0%, but its series breaks in 2022, and from that year alone its share has gone from 0.9% to 4.0%.

Where the share fell

Latvia and Greece are the two exceptions. Latvia's share fell from 15.2% to 12.3% and Greece's from 8.1% to 7.1%, neither series carrying a flag. Both shares went down in every year but one, and in both that year was 2023. In Latvia the count shrank from 304,835 people to 229,681, while the population as a whole went from 2,001,468 to 1,860,565.

A smaller count can come from people leaving the country, from people acquiring its citizenship or from deaths, and the table does not separate them. It gives no reason for either fall, and none is offered here. Latvia's count also takes in its recognised non-citizens, described above, so the fall there describes them and citizens of other countries together.

Sweden is a series that has turned without falling below its starting point. Its share peaked in 2019, at 9.0%, and has fallen in every year since, to 7.8%, still above the 7.1% of 2014. Measured from 2019 rather than 2014, five Member States stand lower in 2025: Latvia, Sweden, Greece, Luxembourg and Slovakia.

The EU as a whole

Eurostat publishes an EU count of residents without the country's citizenship for every year from 2014 to 2024. On 1 January 2024, 43,006,349 of the 449,306,184 people living in the EU were not citizens of the country they lived in: 9.6%, by derived share, with both counts marked as estimated and provisional. Of them, 28,974,079 were citizens of non-EU countries and 13,974,500 citizens of another Member State, two in three and one in three, both counts estimated. In 2019, the one year from 2014 onwards in which neither EU count carries a flag, the share was 7.8%, and in 2014 it was 6.5%. The EU series breaks in 2015, 2017, 2021 and 2023, and its 2014 counts are flagged as a break and as estimated, so those three readings show a direction more reliably than a size.

For 1 January 2025 Eurostat publishes no such EU count, and none is built here by adding up the Member States. The ranking above therefore carries no EU row.