Somalia Population

Somalia has one of the highest fertility rates in the world and an extremely young population, growing fast despite decades of conflict and recurrent drought. Much of the population is nomadic or displaced, and a large diaspora sends home vital remittances. The combination of rapid growth and fragile institutions makes its future especially hard to plan for.

With roughly 20.0 million people as of 2026, Somalia ranks 66th in the world by population. A country of Eastern Africa, its trajectory to 2100 is governed by how births, deaths and migration play out. It packs in roughly 32 people per square kilometre.

The defining marker in Somalia's future is its peak, expected around 2100 at about 67.2 million. After that the population eases back toward 67.2 million by 2100, having passed through 36.8 million at mid-century. The 50 million threshold is reached around 2068.

Fertility is high, around 6.01 births per woman, the engine of rapid, sustained growth.

The median age is set to climb from about 16 today to roughly 33 by 2100, while life expectancy, near 59 years, keeps rising. For now it remains one of the world's youngest populations, with a large generation about to reach working age. That ageing slowly changes everything from the size of the workforce to the cost of care and pensions.

These figures follow the UN's medium variant, the most widely cited scenario. The low and high variants, driven mainly by differing fertility assumptions, fan out into a wide range by 2100, so treat each number as a central estimate rather than a precise forecast.