Editor in chief at IamExpat Media
The year is coming to a close and that can only mean one thing - the new Statistical Yearbook from the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) is here! As we all know, the Germans like a statistic, and so every year since 1952 Destatis has released a collection of facts and figures that present the “state of play” in Germany - and they make for interesting reading!
However, with this year’s Yearbook numbering a whopping 716 pages, it would take you until next Christmas to finally read the whole thing - so we’ve done the hard work for you and trawled through it for some choice stats.
For anyone who's ever wondered where the tallest people in Germany live, who pays the highest rent or where the salaries are biggest, here it is: Germany in 2019, in numbers.
The population might be rapidly ageing, but high levels of migration are just about keeping things on track - the number of people living in the federal republic grew slightly to a grand total of 82,8 million at the end of 2017, just under a quarter (24,1 percent) of whom are non-German. But just where do all these people live? Here are the stats:
The map below is colour-coded to show which states have the highest concentration of residents with a migrant background. The darker the colour, the higher the proportion of non-Germans to Germans.
Love, relationships, family - they may seem like deep, layered concepts to you - but that doesn’t mean Germany can’t quantify them with stats! Did you know that every fourth woman who died in Germany in 2019 was aged 90 or over? Here are some other interesting insights from 2019:
Education
The number of students enrolled in Germany reached a record high this year - and so too did the number of foreign students! But where in Germany are all these brainy people, what are they studying and where do they come from? We’ve got the low-down:
As a nation, Germany is known for being fond of hearty food and beer - rather than being particularly health conscious. So how do the different federal states measure up when it comes to health matters?
As ever, concern over rapidly-spiralling housing costs dominated headlines this year - so it might surprise you to know that the average basic rent in Germany is just 6,72 euros per square metre. On the other end of the scale, around 17 percent of households spend more than 40 percent of their monthly income on rent. Here are some other interesting stats on housing in Germany:
The number of people working in Germany reached a record high of 46,2 million in 2018 and the number of people claiming unemployment benefits sank further, to 3,4 percent of the population. Here are the stats for a record year of work in Germany:
The map below is colour-coded to show where average hourly salaries are highest in Germany. The darker the colour, the higher the wage.
In 2017, a whopping 70,808 million people were transported in Germany. Here’s a breakdown of the stats for all things transportation.
There are also 24 major airports in Germany, from which over 1,24 million flights took off, transporting 223 million passengers and 4,9 million tonnes of goods. The busiest airports this year were:
As you might have noticed, the weather in Germany was unusually warm this year. This is reflected in the stats, which show that the overall average temperature was significantly above the long-term average. There was also less rainfall than the long-term average in every month except January and December. This year, Berlin had 2.300 hours of sunshine.
The graph below shows the temperature (orange) and precipitation (dark blue) in 2018, compared with the long-term averages (yellow and light blue).
If you’re hungry for more information, you can get your hands on all of the statistics in the Statistical Yearbook 2019 (in German).