Population
2025135.5M
+30% since 2015
Resources Ethiopia Today
Ethiopia Today
What the country looks like in numbers — its people, its economy, how people live, and the land itself. Every figure carries the year it is from, because several of them are older than they sound.
Today in Ethiopia
Tikimt 24, 2019 E.C.
One US dollar
162.43 ETB
Language of the labels
Population growth
20252.6%
a year−0.1 points since 2015
Living in towns and cities
202524.1%
+4.7 points since 2015
Under 15 years old
202538.8%
−4.1 points since 2015
Life expectancy
202467.6
years+4.7 since 2014
Children per woman
20243.91
−0.70 since 2014
Infant mortality
202434.5
per 1,000 births−15.5 since 2014
Mother tongues
2007 censusOver 80 languages are spoken
The shares below are the last national count, from the 2007 census. Amharic is the federal working language; several regions work in their own alongside it.
- Oromo33.8%
- Amharic29.3%
- Somali6.2%
- Tigrinya5.9%
- Sidamo4.0%
- Wolaytta2.2%
- Gurage2.0%
- Afar1.7%
- Hadiyya1.7%
- Gamo1.5%
1994 E.C. (2007) Population and Housing Census 2007
Religion
2007 censusOrthodox 43.5%, Muslim 33.9%, Protestant 18.6%
Also Catholic 0.7%, traditional beliefs 2.6%, and other 0.6%. Like the language figures, these are from the 2007 census — no national count has been published since.
1994 E.C. (2007) Population and Housing Census 2007
Script
Ge'ez fidel, 33 base letters in 7 orders
An abugida rather than an alphabet: each letter carries its vowel in its shape. It is one of the few scripts still in daily use that was invented in Africa.
Ge'ez script 2026on this site
What has changed in your lifetime
Ethiopia has changed faster than almost anywhere. Put in the year you were born and see how far.
Anywhere from 1960 to 2026. In the Gregorian calendar.
Where these come from
The figures with a year badge are the World Bank's World Development Indicators, refreshed monthly (last changed 3 November 2026). The Bank publishes each indicator at its own pace: some are current to last year, others are the most recent survey and are years old. The badge is the year of the figure, not the year it was fetched.
Everything else — the regions, the languages, the heritage sites, the dam — is kept by hand with its own source and date beside it. Language and religion come from the 2007 census, which is still the last national count published; treat newer percentages anywhere as estimates rather than counts.