Liechtenstein's population, and who actually lives there

Liechtenstein is one of those countries where the statistics fit in the palm of your hand and still manage to surprise. It has roughly the population of a mid-sized town, yet more jobs than residents, over a third of its population from abroad and a capital that isn’t even its biggest town. Here are the final figures the Office of Statistics published on 25 September 2026, the day before I wrote this.

How many people live in Liechtenstein?

On 31 December 2025 there were 41,228 permanent residents, 20,828 women and 20,400 men. A year earlier there had been 40,886, so the population grew by 0.84%. The Office of Statistics sets that pace against the rest of Europe, where it comes out ahead of Switzerland (0.81%) and behind Spain (0.94%).

If you add the 484 people living in the country on stays of under twelve months, the total population at the end of 2025 was 41,712. I’d always quote the first figure, 41,228, because it’s the one the official statistics treat as the reference number.

Seen over the long run, the growth is striking. In 1911 there were 8,693 inhabitants, and in 1950 the country still hadn’t reached 14,000. It went from 25,215 in 1980 to 32,863 in 2000, and by 2020 it had 39,055. In a little over a century the population has multiplied almost fivefold on exactly the same land.

Eleven very unequal municipalities

The capital, Vaduz, has 6,108 residents, but the most populous municipality is Schaan, just to the north, with 6,294. Triesen, Balzers, Eschen and Mauren follow, all between 4,600 and 5,800. At the other end sit Schellenberg, with 1,180, and Planken, with 499, the smallest by population. The full list, with altitude and what each one offers, is on the municipalities of Liechtenstein.

The regional split tells its own story. The Oberland in the south holds 26,263 people across 125.5 km², and the Unterland in the north 14,965 across 35 km². The Unterland is far smaller but a good deal more crowded, and Mauren, with 618 people per km², is the most densely populated municipality in the country. On provisional 2025 figures the fastest growers were Planken, Triesen, Triesenberg and Vaduz, and the only one to shrink was Gamprin.

What you won’t find is a head count for each village. The Office of Statistics doesn’t publish figures by locality, so for Malbun, Nendeln or Schaanwald there are only old numbers from the Historisches Lexikon, dating from 2008 and 2011, which I wouldn’t pass off as current. Malbun, for instance, had 65 residents in April 2008, and in the ski season visitors outnumber them many times over. The same goes for the tiny Walser hamlets above Triesenberg, which appear on maps but never in the official tables.

More than a third from abroad

Of the 41,228 residents, 26,672 are Liechtenstein nationals and 14,556 are foreign, 35.3%. On provisional end-2025 figures, the Swiss form the largest foreign group (26.8%), followed by Austrians (16.4%) and Germans (13.8%), and just over half, 50.8%, hold the nationality of a European Economic Area country. Everyday life among them runs in German and the local dialect, as I explain in the language of Liechtenstein.

The average age is 44.3, a little lower among Liechtensteiners (43.1) than among foreign residents (46.5). It isn’t a particularly young country, which to me fits the quiet-village feel of the valley.

The figure that explains the country

Resident numbers only tell half the story. At the end of 2024, 43,441 people worked in Liechtenstein, more than lived there, and 24,943 of them came in from abroad every day. That’s why the Office of Statistics itself warns that GDP per head produces misleading results, and why the buses from Sargans and Feldkirch are packed at rush hour. I dig into it on why Liechtenstein is so rich.

Religion, as of the last census

The 2020 census was the last to ask about religion. Back then 69.6% of residents described themselves as Roman Catholic, 8.1% as Protestant and 18.4% as belonging to another faith or none, with the rest not answering. Vaduz has been an archdiocese since 1997, and its Cathedral of St Florin is the church I’d visit to get a feel for that Catholic weight, with the princely crypt beside it. It’s covered on Vaduz Cathedral.

To put all this on the ground, with how big the country is and how its 160 km² are divided, carry on to how big Liechtenstein is.