Median age in Switzerland
The median age in Switzerland is 42.7 years (2024): half the population is older, half younger. That is 12.1 years older than the world median of 30.6, and makes Switzerland the 22nd oldest of 193 countries.
Key numbers
Switzerland among its neighbours
In plain language
Line up everyone in Switzerland by age. The person in the middle is 42.7. That is the median: it says nothing about how old the oldest are or how many babies were born last year, only where the midpoint falls.
A median of 42.7 is older than the world's 30.6. For scale, the youngest country here, Central African Republic, has a median of 14.4 and the oldest, Japan, 49.4. Life expectancy at birth in Switzerland is 84.0 years, so a person at the median age has, on a rough reckoning, about 41.3 years ahead of them.
The 2024figure is the UN's medium-variant number; its estimates end in 2023. For a year this close the projection barely differs from an estimate, since everyone counted has already been born.
Questions
- What is the median age in Switzerland?
- 42.7 years in 2024, by the UN World Population Prospects 2024. Half of the people in Switzerland are younger than 42.7 and half are older. The median is not the average age; it is the midpoint, so a handful of very old people do not move it.
- Is Switzerland's population young or old?
- Older than most. Switzerland is 12.1 years above the world median of 30.6, and ranks 22nd oldest of the 193 countries here. The youngest country, Central African Republic, has a median of 14.4; the oldest, Japan, 49.4.
- How does Switzerland compare to Estonia?
- Estonia has a median age of 42.3, 0.4 years younger than Switzerland. The two sit next to each other in the ranking, at 172nd and 171st youngest.
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Compare your age in SwitzerlandAlso by country: Average height by country, Average BMI by country, Life expectancy by country and Average income by country.