The estimations released by Eurostat foresee that the EU27 population will increase from 501 million on 1 January 2010 to 525 million in 2035. After 2040, it is foreseen that the population gradually decrease. In addition, the EU27 population is also projected to continue to grow older, with the share of the population aged 65 years and over rising from 17% in 2010 to 30% in 2060.

The EUROPOP2010 “convergence scenario” is based on the population on 1st January 2010 and on the assumption that fertility, mortality and net migration will progressively converge between Member States in the long run. Alternative assumptions in a different conceptual framework would yield different results.

The EU27 population is expected to become older throughout the projection period, due in particular to relatively low fertility and an increasing number of people living to higher ages. This ageing process will occur in all Member States. In consequence, the old age dependency ratio in the EU27, i.e. the population aged 65 years and older divided by the population aged 15 to 64, is projected to increase from 26% in 2010 to 53% in 2060. In other words, there would be only two persons aged 15 to 64 for every person aged 65 or more in 2060, compared with four persons to one in 2010.

With regard to the statistics by Member states, there are projected to be considerable differences. Between 2010 and 2060, the population is projected to rise in fourteen Member States and fall in thirteen. The strongest population growth is projected to be found in Ireland (+46%), Luxembourg (+45%) and Cyprus (+41%) and the sharpest declines in Bulgaria (-27%), Latvia (-26%) and Lithuania (-20%). In 2060, the Member States with the largest populations would be the United Kingdom (79 million), France (74 mn), Germany (66 mn), Italy (65 mn) and Spain (52 mn).

On the population aged 80 or more, it is projected to be 12% on average in the EU27 in 2060, to range from 9% in Ireland, Cyprus and the United Kingdom to 14% in Spain, Italy and Germany. Compared with the situation in 1960, the share of those aged 80 or more is expected to grow between five and eighteen times by 2060 in the Member States for which data are available.