Low proportion of young people, especially in East Germany

Berlin. There are particularly few young people living in the eastern German states. In Brandenburg, the proportion of 15 to 24 year olds was 8.8 percent at the end of 2025, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt it was 9.1 percent each and in Thuringia it was 9.2 percent, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Monday.

The national average was 10.0 percent; a total of 8.3 million people in this age group lived in Germany. “The proportion of young people in the total population has been at this low level since the beginning of the 2020s,” the office explained.

For comparison: Young people had the highest proportion of the total population in the first half of the 1980s, when the baby boomers were in their teens. In 1983, one in six people (16.7 percent) in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany was 15 to 24 years old.

The city states of Bremen with 11.1 percent and Hamburg with 10.5 percent as well as the state of Baden-Württemberg with 10.4 percent recorded the highest shares last year. In an EU comparison, Germany's value is also below the average of 10.7 percent. At the beginning of 2025, Ireland had the highest proportion of young people in the EU at 12.7 percent, and Malta had the lowest at 9.4 percent.