Summary: Nottingham had an estimated 325,765 residents in 2025. This was 1.5% fewer than in 2024, when the revised estimate was 330,561. Nottingham remains a relatively young city, with a much larger student-age population and a smaller proportion of older residents than England overall.
Click here to view an infographic of some statistics relating to Nottingham City and its population. Or click here for a PowerPoint-friendly version (landscape format).
The Office for National Statistics estimates that 325,765 people lived in the Nottingham City Council area in mid-2025. This was 4,796 fewer than the revised 2024 estimate, a fall of 1.5%. By comparison, England’s population continued to grow, although the national growth rate slowed to 0.4%.
This was Nottingham’s first year-on-year population decline since 2021 and appears to be its largest annual reduction since at least the early 1990s. It brought the city’s estimated population back to around its 2022 level. Viewed over a longer period, annual population growth has generally slowed since 2016, although the figures fluctuated considerably during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The most likely explanation for these changes is that fewer people moved to Nottingham from overseas, while people continued to leave the city for other parts of the UK. This includes graduates and other young adults moving away. Changes in the balance between births and deaths are unlikely to explain a fall of this size.
However, it is not possible to determine precisely how much each factor contributed from the available data. Population change is also difficult to measure in a university city, where large numbers of people move in and out each year. The 2025 figure is the official estimate, but the precise scale of the reduction should therefore be interpreted with some caution.
In 2025, Nottingham had an estimated 165,367 female residents and 160,398 male residents, or 1.03 females for every male. The population pyramid below compares the age and sex structure in 2015 and 2025. Solid bars show the 2025 estimates. The outlined bars show the age structure of the population in 2015, providing a comparison to the 2025 data that makes changes in the age profile easier to identify. Male populations are shown on the left and female populations on the right.
Nottingham continues to have a young age profile, influenced by its large student population. In 2025, 52,213 residents were aged 19 to 22, representing 16.0% of the city’s population compared with 4.7% across England. This age group has grown by 19.3% in Nottingham since 2015, when it accounted for 14.0% of the population.
By contrast, the number of people aged 19 to 22 across England fell slightly over the same period. Nottingham’s concentration of residents at university ages has therefore become more pronounced, likely due to the growth in number of students registered at universities in Nottingham. This is visible in the population pyramid below, with particularly wide bars between ages 19 and 22.
The number of children aged under 17 in Nottingham remained broadly unchanged between 2015 and 2025, increasing by only 300 to 61,726. However, children now make up a slightly smaller share of the city’s population: 18.9%, compared with 19.6% in 2015. England followed a similar broad pattern, although the number of children increased by 2.6% nationally, compared with 0.5% in Nottingham. In both Nottingham and England, children accounted for a smaller share of the population in 2025 than in 2015.
Within Nottingham’s under-17 population, there has been a clear shift towards older children and teenagers. Between 2015 and 2025, the number of children aged 0 to 4 fell by 3,700, or 17.7%, while the number aged 5 to 10 remained broadly stable. By contrast, the population aged 11 to 16 increased by 4,194, or 22.9%. This is likely to reduce demand for early years and primary school places over time, while demand may remain stronger in secondary schools in the short term before the smaller cohorts reach secondary age.
There were 37,164 residents aged 66 and over in 2025, equivalent to 11.4% of Nottingham’s population. This remained below the England figure of 18.0%. Nottingham’s older population increased by 7.6% between 2015 and 2025, compared with 16.5% across England. Within Nottingham, the number aged 66 to 78 increased by 13.5%, while the number aged 79 and over fell by 3.6%
Data Source: Office for National Statistics mid-year population estimates, accessed through Nomis on 11 August 2026. “Sex” follows the classification used in the source dataset.