How Many Migrants Are There Worldwide: the UN’s 304 Million and Where ‘165 Million’ Came From

A phrase keeps circulating in summaries: "migration in 2026 grew to 165 million people." Neither the UN Secretary-General's report nor the World Migration Report 2026 contains that figure. The closest match is an estimate from the International Labour Organization — 167.7 million people — and it refers to 2022, not 2026.

The confusion isn't accidental: migration is measured three different ways, and the results aren't interchangeable. Here's what actually sits behind each number.

The practical point is simple. If you're comparing countries before a move, or assessing the rental market in a country with a high share of foreign residents, it matters what exactly was measured: people living outside their country of birth is one number, people working abroad is a different one, and nobody publishes a global annual count of border crossings.

Stock: 304 million people live outside their country of birth

The headline figure comes from the UN Population Division's International Migrant Stock 2024 dataset. As of mid-2024, 304 million people — 3.7% of the world's population — were living outside their country of birth. The same estimate is repeated in the World Migration Report 2026 and the UN Secretary-General's February report.

The word "stock" matters here. This isn't a count of moves made in a given year — it's the number of people who, on the observation date, are living outside their country of birth: an accumulated total built up over decades.

How the figure is actually built

• The criterion is country of birth. Where a census doesn't ask about place of birth (the Gulf states, parts of Asia), citizenship is used instead. These are different things: by citizenship, "migrant" captures both someone who arrived yesterday and someone born in the country to expatriate parents.
• The time threshold is 12 months. Under UN recommendations, a long-term migrant is someone who has changed their country of usual residence for a year or more. Three to twelve months counts as short-term, and tourism, medical treatment, pilgrimage and business travel aren't counted at all.
• Data sources are population censuses as the base, population registers where they exist (Scandinavia, the Netherlands), national household surveys, and administrative data. Refugees are added using figures from the relevant UN agencies.
• The observation date is mid-year, 1 July. Coverage spans 233 countries and territories, with some series going back to 1990.
• The 2024 update was fully recalculated for 60 countries — those with a recent census, a particularly large migrant population, or notable refugee flows. For the rest, the estimate extends the 2020 dataset forward. So a meaningful part of the global figure is a model, not a fresh count.

Labour migrants: 167.7 million — the actual source of "165"

The International Labour Organization measures a narrower figure: how many migrants are part of the labour force in the countries where they live. The fourth edition of its Global Estimates on International Migrant Workers (December 2024) puts this at 167.7 million people for 2022 — 4.7% of the global labour force.

Within that: 155.6 million employed, 12.1 million unemployed. High-income countries account for 114.7 million, or 68.4% of the world's migrant workers.

This isn't measured by a separate survey — it's a model layered on top of UN stock data: labour-force participation rates from national employment surveys are applied to the migrant stock estimate, and the result is extended to countries without such surveys. The 2024 edition uses a new methodology, so it can't be compared with older editions by simple subtraction — the ILO's own trend line only applies to the recalculated series.

Flow: the number that doesn't exist

The third way of counting is how many people crossed a border intending to stay, in a given year. This data is collected by national border and migration authorities and isn't comparable between countries: some count issued residence permits, others count address registrations, and some don't count it at all.

Which is why the phrase "migration in 2026 grew to N million" doesn't hold up structurally: nobody publishes global annual flows. What gets published is a stock, as of a date.

What each number actually measures

The last row explains another common mistake: people displaced within their own country aren't in the 304 million at all — they never crossed a border.

What these numbers don't see

• Irregular migrants — only to the extent a census happens to capture them. Undercounting exists everywhere.
• Short-term and seasonal workers — shift work, construction, harvest labour fall below the annual threshold.
• Children of migrants born in the destination country: by country of birth they're local; by citizenship, in some countries, they're not.
• Return migration: someone who left and came back isn't reflected in the stock figure at all.

Why this matters for the UAE

The UAE is an extreme case on this scale: roughly nine out of ten residents are foreign-born, one of the highest shares in the world. Counting here is done by citizenship rather than country of birth, so the statistics still count as a "migrant" someone who has lived in Dubai for twenty years, and their child born in the city.

For the property market, that translates directly into what's visible in practice: rental demand is shaped not by tourists or citizens but by residents on work and investor visas, and the statistics don't measure how long they stay. When you see a migration figure in a report, check first what's behind it: stock or flow, country of birth or citizenship, which data year and which publication year. Those are two different years, and substituting one for the other is the most common mistake in secondhand summaries.