The population of Prague is around 300,000 more than the 1.3 million inhabitants stated in the official census, according to analysis from the Prague Institute of Planning and Development (IPR), based on anonymous data from mobile operators, IPR director Ondrej Bohac told CTK.
Hundreds of thousands more people come daily to the capital city to work.
“It turns out that about 1.6 million people inhabit Prague permanently, and if we add people from the Central Bohemian Region who daily commute to Prague for work, it even amounts to 1.8 million people,” said Bohac. “However, only 1.3 million people have their permanent residence here.”
The increase in the number of residents leads to greater demand for the city to ensure the provision of public transport, parking spaces, apartments, doctors, pre-schools and other facilities, Bohac said.
“So even if the infrastructure expenses increase, quite logically, Prague still loses money from tax revenues,” he added, referring to the fact that the city does not receive revenues from inhabitants who do not have permanent residence in Prague.
The available data shows that although the number of Prague inhabitants has been rising recently, it was not always so.
Prague experienced a population decrease in the 1990’s, for instance. On the other hand, the most rapid increase in the city’s population was between 2003 and 2009, and subsequently in 2014 and 2019, in times of strong economic growth.
According to the CSU data, about 1.28 million people inhabited Prague as of 31 December 2021, which was about 1.3 percent more year-on-year. Throughout the past year, the population increased by 15,993, mostly due to people moving to the city.
The average age of Prague inhabitants was the lowest in the whole country last year, at 41.4 years, which is 1.3 years less than the average age of the Czech Republic. The capital also has the largest proportion of university graduates and foreigners among its residents.
