Milan continues to be one of the most attractive cities in Italy, but official data tell a more nuanced reality than the narrative about the “growing city”.
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In the last ten years, according to statistics from the Municipality of Milan, there has been a movement involving 888,000 people in the city: 488,000 new residents compared to 400,000 “departures” (excluding births and deaths). In practice, adding those who arrive and those who leave, every 12 months between 6 and 9% of the population has been renewed. Translated: one third of today’s Milanese were not Milanese ten years ago. And if the perspective is broadened, more than half of the current inhabitants have moved to the city in the last 15 years.
The point, therefore, is not only how many residents Milan has (at the end of 2025 the residents are 1,399,079, +4% compared to 2014), but how its population is renewed. That is, who arrives, who leaves, and at what stage of life they do so. Leaving aside births and deaths, demographic turnover in the capital is unprecedented: mainly young adults between 19 and 34 years old enter (49% of registry enrollments in the last ten years), while part of the population between 35 and 64 tends to move out of the city (42% of deregistrations).
68% of those who left Milan since 2014 are Italian and 32% foreign. The main destinations are 31% the municipalities of the province of Milan, 25% other Italian municipalities outside the region, 20% other territories of Lombardy, and finally 13% abroad (a residual share concerns unspecified deregistrations, due to official measures, untraceability or post-census registry revisions).
Meanwhile, departures have been largely offset by incoming flows, students and workers arriving from the rest of Italy and especially from abroad. An unprecedented demographic turnover, at a rate of 50,000 new residents per year. Only 27.5% of the new Milanese come from Lombardy and the province; 35.5% come from outside Lombardy; another 31% from abroad.
