The demography of the Republic of Bulgaria is monitored by the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria. Demographic features of the population of Bulgaria include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and others.
Bulgaria has a Human Development Index of 0.799, ranking 70th in the world in 2022 and holds the 38th position in Newsweek’s rankings of the world’s best countries to live in, measuring health, education, political environment and economic dynamism.
Various estimates have put Bulgaria’s medieval population at 1.1 million in 700 AD and 2.6 million in 1365. At the 2011 census, the population inhabiting Bulgaria was 7,364,570 in total, but the 2021 Census calculated that the population had declined to 6.5 million. The peak was in 1989, the year when the borders opened after a half of a century of communist regime, when the population numbered 9,009,018.
The progressive decrease of the Bulgarian population is hindering economic growth and welfare improvement, and the management measures taken to mitigate the negative consequences do not address the essence of the problem. The Government Program for the period 2017 – 2021 is the first one that aims at overturning the trend. The program also identifies the priority means for achieving this goal: measures to increase the birth rate, reduce youth emigration, and build up regulatory and institutional capacity to implement a modern immigration policy tailored to the needs of the Bulgarian business.
The 2001 census defines an ethnic group as a “community of people, related to each other by origin and language, and close to each other by mode of life and culture”; and one’s mother tongue as “the language a person speaks best and usually uses for communication in the family (household)”. According to the 2011 census, among the Bulgarians 99.4% indicate Bulgarian as a mother tongue, 0.3% – Turkish/Balkan gagauz, 0.1% – Roma and 0.1% others; among Turks 96.6% have pointed the Turkish/Balkan Gagauz as a mother tongue and 3.2% – Bulgarian; among the Roma 85% indicate Roma language as a mother tongue, 7.5% – Bulgarian, 6.7% – Turkish/Balkan gagauz and 0.6% – Romanian.
Bulgaria’s traditional religion according to the constitution is the Orthodox Christianity, while Bulgaria is a secular state too. Since the last two censuses (2001 and 2011) provide widely divergent results, they are both shown in the table below. It is noteworthy that over a fifth of the population chose not to respond to this question in the 2011 census.
Over 98% of the population is literate, the males being more literate than the females.
The number of Internet users has increased rapidly since 2000—from 430,000 their number grew to 1.55 million in 2004, and 3.4 million (48 per cent penetration rate) in 2010. Bulgaria has the third-fastest average Broadband Internet speed in the world after South Korea and Romania with an average speed of 1,611 kbit/s. Currently there are three active mobile phone operators.