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Compare · UN World Population Prospects 2024
Portugal and 
Spain, side by side
Portugal in 2026: half the people are older than 48. Spain: half are older than 47.
UN estimates for mid-2023: Portugal 10,430,738 people · Spain 47,911,580
How to read this: each pyramid stacks a place’s people by age — babies at the bottom, the oldest at the top, men on the left and women on the right. A wide bottom means many children; a wide top means many older people.
Each bar is a share of its own place’s people, so a small country and a large one can be read side by side.
men women projected
PRT × ESP · 2026 · age groups
If each place were 100 people
Shrink each population to 100 people and count them. Dots are children under 15, filled squares are people aged 15 to 64, and open squares are people 65 and over. The picture follows the year slider above.
- Children, under 15
- 13
- Aged 15 to 64
- 62
- Aged 65 and over
- 25
- Children, under 15
- 12
- Aged 15 to 64
- 66
- Aged 65 and over
- 22
PRT × ESP · families and lifetimes
Children, and how long lives last
If the birth rates of this year held for a whole lifetime, a woman in Portugal would have about 1.5 children and a woman in Spain about 1.2. Life expectancy at birth this year: about 83 years in Portugal, about 84 in Spain.
Children per woman, 2026
Each figure is one child: how many children a woman would have in her lifetime at that year’s rates.
The dashed line at 2.1 is about what it takes for each generation to replace the one before it, leaving migration aside.
How long a newborn can expect to live, 2026
Each block is ten years of life, if the death rates of that year stayed the same all life long.
Hatched marks are UN projections (medium variant), not measurements.
PRT × ESP · 1950–2100 · how many
How big, and where they are heading
Spain is the larger of the two, with about 5 times as many people as Portugal: 47.9 million to 10.4 million.
Portugal's population is 1.2 times what it was in 1950; Spain's population is 1.7 times what it was in 1950.
Portugal's population peaked in 2010. Meanwhile Spain's population peaked in 2023. In 2100: 8.8 million in Portugal, 33.1 million in Spain (UN projection, medium).
Show the numbers
| Year | Portugal: people | Spain: people | Portugal: half older than | Spain: half older than | Portugal: children per woman | Spain: children per woman | Portugal: life expectancy | Spain: life expectancy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1950 | 8.41888 million | 28.0770 million | 26.0 | 27.5 | 3.16 | 2.47 | 58.5 | 61.8 |
| 1960 | 8.87322 million | 30.4049 million | 27.8 | 29.4 | 3.16 | 2.81 | 64.2 | 69.2 |
| 1970 | 8.66952 million | 33.8127 million | 29.6 | 30.1 | 3.01 | 2.88 | 67.0 | 72.2 |
| 1980 | 9.76362 million | 37.5376 million | 30.5 | 30.7 | 2.25 | 2.21 | 71.7 | 75.5 |
| 1990 | 9.98952 million | 39.0850 million | 34.2 | 33.5 | 1.55 | 1.36 | 74.3 | 77.0 |
| 2000 | 10.2832 million | 41.0198 million | 37.7 | 37.3 | 1.54 | 1.21 | 76.8 | 79.4 |
| 2010 | 10.5787 million | 46.8405 million | 41.5 | 40.2 | 1.38 | 1.37 | 80.1 | 82.0 |
| 2023 | 10.4307 million | 47.9116 million | 47.2 | 45.9 | 1.51 | 1.21 | 82.4 | 83.7 |
| 2030* | 10.3179 million | 47.6105 million | 49.3 | 49.0 | 1.53 | 1.26 | 83.5 | 84.6 |
| 2040* | 10.0823 million | 46.5917 million | 50.1 | 52.0 | 1.56 | 1.31 | 84.9 | 85.9 |
| 2050* | 9.77027 million | 44.9286 million | 49.3 | 52.8 | 1.57 | 1.36 | 86.2 | 87.1 |
| 2060* | 9.39588 million | 42.2108 million | 49.1 | 53.0 | 1.58 | 1.39 | 87.3 | 88.4 |
| 2070* | 9.06061 million | 39.0358 million | 47.8 | 53.7 | 1.59 | 1.43 | 88.5 | 89.5 |
| 2080* | 8.86842 million | 36.5245 million | 47.3 | 52.6 | 1.60 | 1.46 | 89.7 | 90.7 |
| 2090* | 8.80466 million | 34.7742 million | 47.8 | 52.4 | 1.60 | 1.47 | 90.8 | 91.8 |
| 2100* | 8.75399 million | 33.1275 million | 48.3 | 53.2 | 1.61 | 1.48 | 91.9 | 92.9 |
* UN projection, medium variant. People at mid-year; ages and life expectancy in years.
PRT − ESP · 1950–2100 · every age
Which ages each place has more of
Each column is a year and each row an age, from babies at the bottom to 100 at the top. The shade of a cell shows which place has more of its people at that age — the key beside the picture tells you which shade is Portugal and which is Spain, and the in-between shade means the same. Because it compares shares, a small place and a large one can be compared fairly.
236 countries · 1950–2100
Where they sit among all countries
Every country in the world, every year from 1950 to 2100. The grey cloud shows where most countries are; Portugal is drawn in solid blue squares and Spain in open orange squares, so you can see whether each is ahead of the crowd, behind it or in the middle.
Apparatus
Sources and method
Both sides of this comparison come from the UN Population Division's World Population Prospects 2024 — the same release, the same tables, counted to 2023 and projected beyond it on the medium variant. That shared origin is what a comparison rests on.
The working behind the median age, the rounding in the “100 people” pictures and the reason the regions are kept out of the all-country views are all set out in the method.
250 comparisons have a page of their own; any other two places can be compared from the boxes at the top.
Sources: UN WPP 2024 · flag-icons. Every source, its licence and how to cite it →
Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries