Census 2022 · Household survey · Projections to 2062
A nation of numbers,
finally explorable.
The Maldives Bureau of Statistics publishes its census as dozens of PDF tables. This explorer turns the same official figures into charts you can touch — every number below is drawn from MBS releases.
Twenty atolls, pulling apart
Every administrative atoll grew between censuses — but unevenly. Bubble size is population; colour shows the foreign-resident share. Click a bubble or a row to inspect an atoll.
Half of Malé was born somewhere else
The census asks where you live and where you were born. Cross the two and the country's defining movement appears: 76,014 of Malé's 157,254 Maldivian residents — 48% — were born in an atoll, and 17 of the twenty atolls have fewer residents than people born there.
76,014 people
residents less people born there
more people born there than living there
-8,047 people
Where Malé's residents were born
Atolls of birth for people now living in Malé, largest first. This is lifetime migration — the census records where you were born, not when you moved.
Lifetime net gain or loss, by atoll
Residents today less everyone born there, wherever they now live. Malé City gains by far the most; among the atolls only Male' Atoll and North Ari Atoll and South Ari Atoll come out ahead, both of them resort economies that draw workers in.
One limit worth stating: this is lifetime migration. The census records where a person was born and where they now live, so a move made in 1985 and one made last year count the same, and someone who moved to Malé and back appears never to have left. It shows the accumulated direction of travel, not its pace. Source: Resident Maldivian population by place of usual residence cross-classified by place of birth, census table MG3.
A pyramid with a working-age bulge
Migration for work reshapes the age structure: the 25–39 bands swell far beyond what births alone would produce, especially in Malé. Switch locality to see how different the two Maldivess are.
The widest bands of the pyramid. In the Republic, ages 25–39 hold 197,686 people — 38% of everyone counted.
of foreign residents are male — migrant workers in construction, tourism and fisheries drive the bulge.
Maldivian males per 100 females. Among foreign residents the ratio is 780 per 100.
Two economies, one labour market
Tourism and construction run on migrant labour; government, education and health run on Maldivians. Sort by foreign share to see the split — then check how unemployment differs atoll by atoll.
Construction is 85% foreign-staffed; accommodation & food (tourism) is 65% foreign. Public administration is 94% Maldivian. Unemployment is almost entirely a Maldivian phenomenon — 9,244 of the 9,324 jobseekers are citizens, and rates in the outer atolls run two to three times the Malé level.
A newer answer to the same question
The census counted work on one night in September 2022. The Labour Force Survey 2024–2025 asked again, and got different numbers — lower unemployment, and a participation gap between Maldivian men and women of 27 percentage points.
census 2022 said 3%
census 2022 said 5.1%
against 80.6% of Maldivian men
almost all of them are here to work
Two measurements, two answers
Unemployment as counted by the census in 2022 and by the labour force survey in 2024–25. They are different instruments — a census night against a sampled survey — so the gap is not a trend, and neither figure is a revision of the other.
Who is in the labour force at all
Participation rate — the share of working-age people either working or looking for work. Foreign residents are here on employment visas, so their rate is close to the ceiling; the Maldivian gender gap is the striking number.
Where the work is, and who does it
Employed residents by broad industry group, split by nationality. Secondary industry — construction and manufacturing — is overwhelmingly foreign; services are more mixed.
Smaller homes, fuller lives
Households tripled since 1990 while the people in them shrank. Meanwhile a quiet revolution in drinking water: three in four residents now drink treated water, versus under half in 2014.
94,424 households in 2022 — 3.2× the 1990 count. Malé alone holds 45%.
Atoll households fell from 9.8 to 5.8 people. The extended family is contracting.
faded fill = 2014 · marker line = 2022
A 3-bedroom costs 4× more in Malé than in the atolls — the arithmetic behind migration.
2047: the crossover
MBS projects that by 2047 the Maldives will have as many residents over 65 as children under 15 — a first in the country's history. Press play and watch the two lines converge.
elderly per 100 children
25 years until elderly outnumber children.
growth in the 65+ population by 2062 (20,792 → 119,710), while the number of children falls by 44%.
elderly per 100 children by 2062, from 20 today — the ageing index more than doubles after the crossover alone.
is the revised crossover year. The earlier release of this projection put it at 2045; the March 2026 tables move it two years out.