VIENNA: More than every second person living in Vienna now has a migration background, according to fresh 2025 figures from Statistics Austria.
The data show that 51.3 percent of the city’s population around 1.019 million people fall into this category. Under Austria’s official definition, a person has a migration background if both parents were born abroad, regardless of the individual’s own citizenship or place of birth, as reported by the Heute.
Vienna’s share is far above the national average. Across Austria, 28.2 percent of residents have a migration background. The gap with other federal states is stark: Vorarlberg ranks second at 28.6 percent, while Burgenland records the lowest share at 15.2 percent. In other words, Vienna’s proportion is more than three times that of Burgenland.
The concentration of migration in the capital is underlined by another figure. At the start of 2026, almost 40 percent of all people born outside Austria were living in Vienna. By contrast, only 17 percent of the population born inside Austria resided in the capital.
The pattern is especially pronounced for people originating from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Around 56 percent of all residents in Austria who were born in these three countries live in Vienna.
There are also clear differences in terms of origin. Among Vienna’s foreign born population, 65.1 percent come from countries outside the EU and EFTA (so called third countries), while 34.9 percent were born in another EU or EFTA state or in the United Kingdom.
In Burgenland, the balance is almost reversed: 67.2 percent of the foreign-born population there come from EU/EFTA countries or the UK, and 32.8 percent from third countries.
Of Vienna’s total population, 38.7 percent belong to the first generation of immigrants, they were born abroad and later moved to Austria. Another 12.6 percent belong to the second generation: they were born in Austria, but their parents were not. Taken together, these two groups account for the city’s 51.3 percent share of residents with a migration background.
The new statistics highlight how migration has reshaped Vienna’s demographic profile over recent decades, turning the capital into a distinctly more diverse city than the rest of Austria.
