Last year, 287,590 non-Belgians but holders of a European Union passport lived in the Brussels region. The figure comes from the Brussels statistics office Bisa. The number of non-Belgian Europeans corresponds to around 23% of all Brussels residents.
This year's edition of Bisa's annual 'Mini-Bru' guide draws inspiration from Belgium's EU presidency. The guide contains recent statistics on the Brussels population including incomes and information on politics. Because Belgium holds the EU presidency during the first six months of the year, the guide also includes a separate chapter on European residents.
These numbered 287,590 in Brussels in 2023, twice as many as 20 years ago. The number of residents with a European Union passport who are not Belgian continues to grow steadily. In addition, 170,562 people with a non-EU nationality live in the Belgian and Flemish capital. Together, they account for 181 different nationalities across the region.
Among European expats, the French remain the largest group. There are no fewer than 69,984 French nationals, comparable to a large municipality. In second place come Romanians, with 46,572, followed by the Italians numbering 35,929. Maltese, Cypriots and Estonians are rarer with less than a thousand each. The average age of all these Europeans is 37 and they mostly live in the south-eastern part of the city.
East European women love Brussels
Nationalities arrived at different times. Italians, Greeks and Spaniards have been in Brussels since the 1990s in roughly the same numbers as today. There is no sustained immigration and the average age in these groups is around or above 40. More and more Romanians, Portuguese, Poles and French are joining communities already established here. The average Romanian is only 32 years of age and more often male than female. Six out of ten immigrants from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are women.
Brussels residents with a non-EU nationality mainly hail from Morocco (7.3%), Ukraine (2.8%) and Syria (2.2%).