Key Fact & Findings
- Peru’s population reached 34.1 million at the 2025 census, up 2.9 million from 31.2 million in 2017, an annual growth rate of 1.11 percent.
- The coastal population share rose from just 28.3 percent in 1940 to 58.0 percent by 2017, while the highland share fell to 28.1 percent over the same period.
- Lima region alone held 10.1 million people, 29.7 percent of Peru’s national population, at the 2025 census.
- The highland Sierra lost roughly 600,000 people in relative population share between 2007 and 2017 even as the national population grew.
- Puno, Huancavelica and Ancash were the regions with the most outward migration as of the 2025 census.
- Peru’s median age rose from 32 to 34.2 years between 2017 and 2025, and the ratio of elderly to young people nearly doubled, from 44 to 65 elderly per 100 youngsters.
Peru’s population reached 34.1 million people at the 2025 census, up from 31.2 million in 2017, but the more striking number is where those people live. In 1940, only 28.3 percent of Peruvians lived on the coast. By 2017 that share had climbed to 58 percent, and Lima alone now holds 29.7 percent of the entire country’s population, 10.1 million people in a single metropolitan region. Peru has spent the better part of a century transforming from a highland-centered country into an overwhelmingly coastal, urban one, and that transformation is still actively reshaping where Peruvians live, work and grow old.
Peru’s Population Is Distributed Across Three Very Different Geographic Zones
Peru divides naturally into three geographic regions that also function as three distinct demographic zones: the Costa (Coast), a narrow desert strip running the length of the country along the Pacific; the Sierra (Andean highlands), the historic population core of Peru dating back to pre-Columbian civilizations; and the Selva (Amazon jungle), covering roughly 60 percent of national territory but historically the least populated. Each region has followed its own demographic trajectory over the past eight decades, and the balance between them has shifted dramatically.
Peru’s Population Map Has Changed Dramatically Since 1940
The scale of Peru’s coastal shift becomes clear when the shares are lined up across census years.
Population Share by Natural Region
| Year | Coast | Highlands (Sierra) | Jungle (Selva) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1940 | 28.3% | not directly comparable | not directly comparable |
| 2007 | 54.6% | approx. 32% | approx. 13% |
| 2017 | 58.0% | 28.1% | 13.9% |
Between 2007 and 2017 alone, the highland population share fell by roughly 600,000 people even as the national population grew, meaning the Sierra lost population in absolute terms over that decade while the Costa and Selva both gained. This is not a story of the highlands simply growing more slowly than the coast; in the most recent intercensal period, parts of the highland population base actively shrank.
Why the Coast Became Peru’s Population Center
The mechanisms behind this shift are straightforward and mutually reinforcing. Lima’s role as the colonial and then republican capital gave the coast an early administrative advantage that concentrated government employment, higher education and, eventually, industrial investment. Port-based trade through Callao added commercial weight. Twentieth-century agricultural modernization along the coastal valleys, supported by large-scale irrigation projects, created commercial farming employment that pulled migrants from the highlands even before industrialization took hold in Lima itself.
Highland push factors mattered just as much as coastal pull factors. Subsistence agriculture in the Sierra offered limited economic mobility, land fragmentation across generations reduced average farm sizes, and, during the 1980s and early 1990s, internal armed conflict displaced large numbers of highland residents toward coastal cities, particularly Lima, a wave of displacement that reinforced migration patterns already underway for economic reasons. Improved road and transport links over subsequent decades made the coastal migration option progressively easier to act on, compounding the shift.
Lima’s Extraordinary Demographic Concentration
Lima, combined with the neighboring port city of Callao, forms the Lima Metropolitan Area, Peru’s dominant urban center by an overwhelming margin. At the 2025 census, Lima region alone accounted for 10.1 million people, 29.7 percent of Peru’s national population, nearly three times the population of Piura, the country’s second-largest region.
That concentration has deepened over successive censuses even as its rate of growth has moderated. Lima held 30.8 percent of the national population in 2007 and 32.3 percent in 2017, before easing slightly to 29.7 percent by 2025, a modest relative decline that likely reflects Lima’s own population growth slowing as fertility falls nationally, even as the capital continues to be Peru’s primary destination for internal migrants from Puno, Huancavelica and other historically outward-migrating highland regions.
Peru’s Most Populous Regions, 2017 Census
| Region | Population (2017) |
|---|---|
| Lima | 9,485,405 |
| Piura | 1,856,809 (approx.) |
| La Libertad | approx. 1.9 million |
| Cajamarca | approx. 1.3 million |
| Puno | approx. 1.2 million |
Lima’s national dominance means that Peru’s demographic story is, to a significant degree, Lima’s demographic story: what happens to fertility, migration and aging in the capital shapes the national averages more than any other single region.
The Andes: Population, Migration and Depopulation Pressures
The highland regions of Puno, Huancavelica and Ancash were specifically identified in the 2025 census as the areas experiencing the most outward migration, continuing a pattern of highland-to-coast movement that has persisted for decades. This ongoing outmigration compounds an aging effect already visible nationally: as younger, working-age highland residents leave for Lima or other coastal cities, the highland regions that remain are left with older, more slowly growing populations, a dynamic similar to rural depopulation patterns seen in parts of Europe and North America, but driven by internal rather than international migration.
The highland population that remains is not uniformly declining, since some Sierra cities, particularly regional capitals like Arequipa, Cusco and Huancayo, have grown as internal migration hubs in their own right, absorbing rural highland migrants who move toward regional urban centers rather than making the longer journey to Lima. But smaller, more remote highland provinces have faced sustained population loss, raising longer-term questions about the sustainability of public services, from schools to healthcare posts, in areas with shrinking and aging populations.
The Amazon Region Has a Different Population Geography
The Selva presents yet another pattern. Despite covering roughly 60 percent of Peru’s national territory, the Amazon region held only about 13.9 percent of the population as of 2017, though that share has grown steadily from earlier decades, reflecting both natural population growth and migration into jungle cities such as Iquitos and Pucallpa, which function as regional hubs much like their highland counterparts.
Population density in the Selva remains extremely low outside these urban centers, reflecting the practical difficulty of settlement in dense rainforest terrain accessible mainly by river and, more recently, limited road corridors. Indigenous communities across the Amazon region continue to face distinct infrastructure and public service access challenges tied to this dispersed settlement pattern, an issue that recurs in the demographic geography of Amazon basin countries more broadly.
Peru’s Urban Transformation
Underlying all three regional stories is a single overarching trend: Peru has become a predominantly urban country. National urbanization has climbed steadily for decades, driven overwhelmingly by the highland-to-coast migration described above but reinforced by rural-to-urban movement within each region individually, including growing jungle cities and highland regional capitals.
The 2025 census’s finding that median national age rose from 32 to 34.2 years, alongside a jump in the elderly-to-youth ratio from 44 to 65 elderly people per 100 young people in just eight years, reflects this urban, lower-fertility Peru rather than the higher-fertility rural Peru of previous generations.
What Peru’s Changing Population Geography Means for the Future
Peru’s continued coastal and urban concentration carries consequences that extend well beyond where the population count sits on a map. Lima’s water supply, drawn from Andean sources that themselves depend on glacial and seasonal rainfall patterns increasingly affected by climate variability, faces sustained pressure from a metropolitan population approaching a third of the entire country. Housing demand in Lima’s periphery continues generating informal settlement growth on hillsides and desert margins around the city, a pattern documented for decades in Lima’s urban expansion.
Regional inequality between an increasingly wealthy, aging coastal Peru and a shrinking, historically underserved highland Peru raises long-term questions about infrastructure investment, since a smaller and older highland population base makes it harder to justify the same per-capita spending on schools, roads and clinics that a younger, growing population would warrant, even as those regions retain some of the country’s most significant agricultural and cultural resources. Secondary coastal and highland cities, from Arequipa to Trujillo to Cusco, represent one of the few counterweights to further Lima concentration, and their continued growth will likely determine whether Peru’s future population map becomes even more Lima-centric or develops a more genuinely multi-polar urban system.
Conclusion
Peru’s population map today would be unrecognizable to a demographer working in 1940, when fewer than three in ten Peruvians lived on the coast. That share has since more than doubled, concentrated overwhelmingly in and around Lima, while highland provinces continue losing residents to the very migration pattern that built the modern coastal Peru.
The 2025 census data suggests this transformation has not finished: Peru is simultaneously urbanizing, coastalizing and aging, three trends that are mutually reinforcing and likely to keep reshaping the country’s population geography for decades to come.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why is Peru’s population concentrated on the coast?
Lima’s historical role as colonial and national capital, coastal agricultural modernization, and internal conflict-driven displacement from the highlands during the 1980s and 1990s together pulled population steadily toward the coast over the twentieth century.
2. What percentage of Peru lives on the coast?
As of the 2017 census, 58.0 percent of Peru’s population lived on the coast, up from 54.6 percent in 2007 and just 28.3 percent in 1940.
3. Why is Lima so dominant demographically?
Lima combines national political and economic centrality with a metropolitan population of roughly 10.1 million, 29.7 percent of Peru’s total population as of 2025, a concentration built up over decades of highland-to-coast migration.
4. Is Peru’s highland population declining?
Some highland regions, notably Puno, Huancavelica and Ancash, are experiencing sustained outward migration, and the Sierra’s overall population share fell between the 2007 and 2017 censuses even as national population grew, though regional highland cities like Arequipa and Cusco continue to grow.
5. What is Peru’s total population?
Peru’s population reached 34.1 million at the 2025 census, according to preliminary INEI results, up from 31.2 million in 2017.
6. How much of Peru’s population lives in the Amazon jungle region?
Approximately 13.9 percent of Peru’s population lived in the Selva as of the 2017 census, despite the region covering roughly 60 percent of the country’s land area.
7. Is Peru’s population aging?
Yes. The median age rose from 32 to 34.2 years between the 2017 and 2025 censuses, while the share of the population aged 60 and over grew from 11.7 percent to 14.8 percent over the same period.
8. What drove people to migrate from the Andes to Lima?
Limited economic opportunity in subsistence highland agriculture, land fragmentation, and, during the 1980s and 1990s, displacement caused by internal armed conflict all pushed highland residents toward coastal cities, primarily Lima.
9. Are secondary Peruvian cities growing?
Yes. Regional hubs such as Arequipa, Trujillo, Cusco and jungle cities like Iquitos and Pucallpa have absorbed a share of internal migration that might otherwise have gone entirely to Lima, though none approach the capital’s scale.
10. How fast is Peru’s population growing?
Peru’s population grew 1.11 percent annually between the 2017 and 2025 censuses, faster than the previous intercensal period, driven in part by immigration alongside natural increase.
Sources
- Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática (INEI), 2025 Census preliminary results
- Peru Support Group, summary of INEI 2025 census preliminary findings
- INEI, 2017 Peruvian census (XII Censo de Población)
- INEI, 2007 Peruvian census
- Peruvian Times, analysis of 2017 census regional population shifts
