Net Migration by Country: Who Gains People, and Who Loses Them

By the populationclock.org team · Published October 29, 2026 · All figures: UN World Population Prospects 2024, medium variant

The short answer

On the UN projection for 2026, the United States gains the most people from migration, about 1.2 million more arrivals than departures, and Pakistan loses the most, about 1.1 million. Across all 237 countries and territories, 101 are net gainers and 135 are net losers, and the whole set sums to roughly 73 people, which is zero with rounding. The world still grows by about 68.9 million this year, and every one of them comes from births outnumbering deaths, as our piece on whether world population is decreasing sets out.

Who gains

The inflows are concentrated. The United States takes about 24% of every net arrival counted anywhere in the world this year. The next places down, the United Kingdom, Russia, Syria and Canada, each gain in the hundreds of thousands. The table below includes countries people have recently been leaving in large numbers, because the dataset carries one net figure per country: displacement and return are folded in with work and family migration, and a large return flow looks exactly like a large arrival flow.

The last column is why the first one matters: where it is negative, migration is the only thing keeping the population from falling.

Totals flatter big countries. Per 1,000 residents the heaviest inflows among countries above 5 million people are Oman at about 14.3, Syria at about 11.7, the United Arab Emirates at about 7.6 and Canada at about 7.2. Canada is the clearest case of a rich country growing on arrivals alone: births beat deaths there by only about 30 thousand this year, against net migration of roughly 291 thousand. The United Kingdom is further along the same path: its births exceed its deaths by about 306 people in 2026, a margin that turns negative in 2027, so effectively all of its growth is arrivals rather than babies.

Who loses

The outflows are spread more widely, which is why they are less visible. Pakistan leads at about 1.1 million net departures, followed by India, Bangladesh, Nepal and China. Relative to population the largest outflow above 5 million people belongs to Nepal, at about 9.9 per 1,000 residents.

Emigration at this scale barely changes those countries’ trajectories. Pakistan loses about 1.1 million people to migration in 2026 and still grows by roughly 4.1 million, because births exceed deaths there by about 5.3 million. Of the 135 countries losing people to migration, 92 are growing anyway. Departures are a rounding item against a young age structure.

Migration rarely rescues a shrinking country

This is the finding that cuts against the common assumption. 19 countries above a million people already record more deaths than births and a net inflow of migrants in 2026. In only two of them, Sweden and Belgium, is the inflow big enough to keep the total rising. Russia, Germany, Japan, Spain and South Korea all gain migrants and shrink regardless, because the gap between births and deaths is several times the inflow. The arithmetic behind that is the subject of Europe’s quiet population decline.

The United States is the one large exception, and only because the flow is so big. Migration supplies about 69% of American population growth this year. American deaths overtake American births around 2042, and the country keeps growing anyway: cumulative net migration there between 2026 and 2100 comes to roughly 95.8 million, against a cumulative natural change of about -22.5 million. Without the inflow the projection would have the country shrinking, which is the argument of how the United States keeps growing.

Across the century

Adding up the annual flows from 2026 to 2100 gives the scale of the redistribution. The United States gains about 95.8 million over those 74 years, roughly 36% of all net migration into anywhere. Russia gains about 22.9 million, Canada gains about 20.2 million and the United Kingdom gains about 13.9 million. The largest cumulative losses are Pakistan at about 42.8 million, India at about 27.4 million, Bangladesh at about 22.0 million and Uganda at about 11.9 million.

Measured against present size the ranking changes. For Canada and Australia the century’s cumulative inflow is equivalent to about 50% and 49% of their current populations respectively. By region, the projection moves people out of Asia (about 120 million), Africa (about 66.8 million) and Latin America & the Caribbean (about 18.5 million) and into Northern America (about 116 million), Europe (about 75.7 million) and Oceania (about 13.6 million). The continental totals are dominated by births rather than by these flows, but the flows all run the same direction: from younger places to older ones.

How much of this to believe

Less than for births and deaths. Three reasons. The figures are net, not gross: a country with large arrivals and large departures can appear at nearly zero, and this dataset cannot separate the two. The flows mix categories that behave differently, labour migration, family reunification, displacement and return, and only the total is published. And migration is the component most exposed to decisions that can change in a single year, and the projection accordingly has it settling down rather than persisting at current levels: worldwide net inflows total about 4.9 million in 2026 and about 3.3 million in 2100.

What is solid is the sign and the ranking. The rich, old, slow-growing countries gain, the young fast-growing ones lose, the sums cancel, and in almost every country the number of births still matters more than the number of arrivals. Our methodology describes how these series are assembled.

Frequently asked questions

Net migration figures are the UN World Population Prospects 2024 medium variant, summed across all 237 countries and territories for world and regional totals.