Malta’s population grew faster than that of every other EU country over the decade between 2015 and 2025, new Eurostat figures have revealed.Between 1st January 2015 and 1st January 2025, Malta recorded a staggering 30.9% increase in its population, comfortably the largest percentage increase anywhere in the European Union.That puts Malta well ahead of Luxembourg, which came second with growth of 21.1%, followed by Ireland at 16.3%.The figures paint a striking picture of just how rapidly Malta has changed over the space of a decade.Across the EU as a whole, the population grew by just 1.8% during the same period, equivalent to an increase of around 7.8 million people.In other words, Malta’s percentage population growth was more than 17 times the EU-wide rate.Eurostat identifies net inward migration as the driving force behind the EU’s overall population growth during the decade, with migration compensating for the impact of more deaths than births across the bloc.Malta’s longer-term transformation is similarly striking.Looking back 20 years, Eurostat found that Malta’s population increased by 43% between 2005 and 2025. Only Luxembourg, with growth of 48%, recorded a larger increase over that longer period.By 1st January 2025, Malta was home to around 574,000 people, according to Eurostat, making it the EU’s smallest member state by population. Luxembourg followed with around 682,000 inhabitants.And Malta’s population was still growing rapidly at the end of the period.Separate Eurostat figures for 2024 show Malta recorded the EU’s highest population growth rate that year, at 19 people per 1,000 inhabitants.But while Malta sits at one extreme of Europe’s demographic shift, several countries have been moving in the opposite direction.Between 2015 and 2025, Bulgaria experienced the EU’s sharpest population decline at 8.4%, followed by Croatia at 7.3% and Latvia at 6.3%.Eurostat said natural population decline, where deaths outnumber births, combined with net outward migration to reduce populations in all three countries, as well as in Poland and Romania.The figures highlight an increasingly uneven demographic picture across Europe: while a number of countries are struggling with shrinking populations, Malta has undergone the EU’s fastest population expansion in just a decade.What do you make of these figures?•