Iranian and Afghan background in Sweden: SCB register data, 2018–2025

At the end of 2025, 87,292 people born in Iran and 68,819 people born in Afghanistan were registered as living in Sweden (Statistics Sweden, SCB). A further 48,412 people born in Sweden had at least one parent born in Iran: 20,637 with both parents born in Iran, 11,212 with one Iran-born parent and one parent born in another country outside Sweden, and 16,563 with one Iran-born parent and one Sweden-born parent. For Afghanistan the same three groups were 15,921, 4,257 and 2,248. Since 2018, the Iran-born group grew by 12.8% and the Afghanistan-born group by 32.4%, while Sweden's population grew by 3.7%. In schools, 14,571 pupils in compulsory school were reported as entitled to Persian mother-tongue tuition in 2025/26, and 8,076 took part (Skolverket). Sweden collects no official language statistics, so these are counts of where people and their parents were born, not of who speaks Persian or Dari. Azizan (azizan.app) publishes this free analysis of public data from Statistics Sweden (SCB) and the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket); every count comes from one named table, and the percentages and sums are our own arithmetic, shown in full.

Azizan (azizan.app) is a family storytelling app for immigrant and diaspora families: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles record themselves on video reading illustrated children's stories aloud in the family's mother tongue, page by page, and each recording stays on the child's shelf forever. Real family voices — never AI narration. Persian (Farsi) first.

The key numbers

Statistics Sweden (SCB) publishes a yearly count, from the population register, of everyone born abroad and everyone born in Sweden with at least one foreign-born parent, by the country where they or their parents were born. It is a full count of registered residents on 31 December, not a survey sample. Table TAB6772 gives these counts from 2018, the first year it covers, to 2025.

Registered in Sweden, 31 December 2025	Iran	Afghanistan
Born in the country	87,292	68,819
Born in Sweden, both parents born in the country	20,637	15,921
Born in Sweden, one parent born in the country, the other born in another country outside Sweden	11,212	4,257
Born in Sweden, one parent born in the country, the other born in Sweden	16,563	2,248
Born in Sweden with at least one parent born in the country (our sum of the three rows above)	48,412	22,426

Out of 10,605,529 people registered in Sweden at the end of 2025, the Iran-born were 0.82% and the Afghanistan-born 0.65%. Of the Iran-born, 44,892 were men and 42,403 women; of the Afghanistan-born, 42,413 were men and 26,409 women.

Within one country the rows do not overlap, so they can be added: a person born in Sweden is counted once under Iran, by the parent born there. Across the two countries they do overlap. Someone with an Iran-born father and an Afghanistan-born mother appears in both columns, so the Iran and Afghanistan figures should not be added together.

Mixed families: the parent split

The table separates people born in Sweden by who their parents are. That makes it possible to see how many have one parent born in Iran and one parent born in Sweden, which no census language table can show.

Born in Sweden, at least one Iran-born parent	2018	2025	Share in 2025
Both parents born in Iran	18,124	20,637	42.6%
Iran-born father, mother born in another country outside Sweden	5,271	6,576	13.6%
Iran-born mother, father born in another country outside Sweden	2,897	4,636	9.6%
Iran-born father, Sweden-born mother	8,643	10,728	22.2%
Iran-born mother, Sweden-born father	4,335	5,835	12.1%
Total (our sum)	39,270	48,412	100%

So in 2025 fewer than half, 42.6%, of Sweden-born people with an Iran-born parent had two Iran-born parents. About a third, 34.2%, had one Iran-born and one Sweden-born parent, and that group grew fastest of the three, by 27.6% since 2018, compared with 13.9% for two Iran-born parents.

For Afghanistan the picture is different. Of the 22,426 Sweden-born people with an Afghanistan-born parent in 2025, 71.0% had two Afghanistan-born parents, 19.0% had one parent born in another country outside Sweden, and 10.0% had one Sweden-born parent.

The table does not record which language anyone speaks at home, so it cannot say whether a child with one Persian-speaking parent hears Persian. It shows how many such families exist, not what happens inside them. Other research on homes where only one parent speaks the heritage language is summarised on our page on why immigrant families lose their mother tongue in one generation.

Change from 2018 to 2025

Registered in Sweden, 31 December	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
Born in Iran	77,386	80,136	81,301	83,122	85,488	86,838	87,115	87,292
Born in Sweden, both parents born in Iran	18,124	18,611	19,084	19,529	19,867	20,178	20,424	20,637
Born in Sweden, one parent born in Iran, one in Sweden (our sum)	12,978	13,624	14,207	14,797	15,301	15,762	16,184	16,563
Born in Afghanistan	51,979	58,780	60,858	62,803	65,662	67,738	68,164	68,819
Born in Sweden, both parents born in Afghanistan	8,425	9,430	10,409	11,299	12,344	13,599	14,719	15,921

Over seven years the Iran-born group grew by 9,906 people, or 12.8%, and the Afghanistan-born group by 16,840, or 32.4%. Sweden's population grew by 3.7% over the same period, from 10,230,185 to 10,605,529. The number of Sweden-born people with two Afghanistan-born parents nearly doubled, up 89.0%, and the number with two Iran-born parents rose by 13.9%.

A register count is a balance: births, arrivals, deaths and people leaving all move it, and this table does not separate them. It also does not say why anyone moved, and this page does not discuss it. The 2025 figures carry SCB's new small privacy adjustment, so a change of a few people between 2024 and 2025 means little.

Persian in Swedish schools: mother-tongue tuition

Sweden gives pupils whose guardian has a mother tongue other than Swedish, and who use it daily at home, a right to mother-tongue tuition (modersmålsundervisning). A school must arrange it in a language when at least five eligible pupils want it and a suitable teacher is available. Skolverket counts the pupils that schools know to be entitled, and those who take part, on 15 October each year.

Compulsory school (grundskola)	2020/21	2025/26
Pupils entitled to Persian tuition	14,540	14,571
Pupils taking part in Persian tuition	8,736	8,076
Share of entitled pupils who took part	60.1%	55.4%
All languages: share of entitled pupils who took part	59.7%	55.2%

In 2025/26 Persian had the fourth-largest number of pupils taking part, after Arabic (46,401), Somali (13,592) and English (9,963). Entitled pupils stayed almost flat over five years, up 31, while pupils taking part fell by 660, or 7.6%, roughly in line with the drop across all languages. Of the pupils taking Persian, 81.1% had their lessons outside the guaranteed teaching time, for example after the school day.

These counts are the closest thing Sweden publishes to a language figure, and they are narrow. They cover only pupils in compulsory school, roughly ages 7 to 16, and only those a school knows about. Since 2019/20 schools report one mother tongue per pupil, so years before that are not comparable and we do not use them.

Dari is not published. SCB's code list for school reporting has separate codes for Dari (PRS) and Persian (FAS, PES). Skolverket's national table lists only the ten largest languages and puts the rest into one row, "other languages (177)". Dari is not among the ten, so there is no published Dari figure, and we could not confirm whether some pupils from Dari-speaking families are reported under Persian. We do not estimate it. Skolverket's statistics team can be asked at utbildningsstatistik@skolverket.se.

For a family the practical question is how to keep Persian or Dari in a child's week beyond one lesson. Azizan is one answer to that question: relatives, often grandparents in another country, record themselves on video reading illustrated Persian stories page by page, and the child can watch and listen again. For the differences between the varieties, see our page on Farsi, Persian, Dari and Tajik, and for Dari families, our list of Dari words for kids.

What the registers cannot tell us

Every number on this page can be checked, and each has limits worth stating plainly.

No language data. Sweden collects no official statistics on the languages people speak, and its population register does not record language. These are counts of country of birth and parents' country of birth, not of Persian or Dari speakers. A Sweden-born grandchild of Iran-born grandparents, whose parents were both born in Sweden, does not appear at all.
Country of birth is not language or ethnicity. People born in Iran include many ethnic and language groups, among them speakers of Persian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian and other languages. People born in Afghanistan include speakers of Dari, Pashto, Hazaragi, Uzbek and others. Some people born in Iran have Afghan parents, and the reverse. The table cannot separate any of this.
No age split, so no count of children. Table TAB6772 has no age variable. "Born in Sweden with an Iran-born parent" includes adults born in the 1980s as well as babies born last year. We do not estimate how many are children.
The countries overlap. A person with one Iran-born and one Afghanistan-born parent is counted under both countries. Do not add the two columns.
Small privacy adjustments from 2025. SCB now adds a small random change to every published cell. Our sums of several cells carry that uncertainty too; for example, men plus women born in Iran give 87,295, against a published total of 87,292.
School counts are a narrow proxy. Mother-tongue tuition covers compulsory-school pupils only, counts only entitled pupils known to schools, and depends on a teacher and at least five pupils being available locally. It is not a count of children who speak Persian.
Not comparable with the census language pages. The US page counts people aged 5 and over by language spoken at home, from a sample survey. The England and Wales page counts main language from age 3. The Australia page counts the language other than English used most often at home, with Persian, Dari and Hazaraghi separate. The Canada page reads mother tongue and home language for children aged 0 to 14. This page counts birthplaces in a register. Adding these figures up, or ranking the countries from them, would be wrong.

Methods: how to reproduce every number

All counts were retrieved on 1 November 2026. The SCB figures come from the keyless SCB PxWeb API: send a POST request with the JSON body shown and "format":"csv", or open the URL with GET to see the variables. In table TAB6772, origin codes are Utr (born abroad), Inr2uS (born in Sweden, two foreign-born parents with the same country of birth), Inr2uOF and Inr2uOM (born in Sweden, two foreign-born parents with different countries, by the father's or mother's country), and Inr1uF and Inr1uM (born in Sweden, one Sweden-born parent, by the foreign-born father's or mother's country). The Skolverket figures come from the national tables in the "Sök statistik" search, school form "Grundskola och sameskola", area "Skolor och elever".

Country of birth and parents' country of birth, Iran (IR) and Afghanistan (AF), 2018 to 2025 (SCB table TAB6772). POST to https://api.scb.se/OV0104/v1/doris/en/ssd/BE/BE0101/BE0101Q/FolkmForUrspCKMv2 with the body {"query":[{"code":"Ursprung","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["Utr","Inr2uS","Inr2uOF","Inr2uOM","Inr1uF","Inr1uM"]}},{"code":"Kon","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["TotSa"]}},{"code":"Fodelseland","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["IR","AF"]}},{"code":"Tid","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["2018","2019","2020","2021","2022","2023","2024","2025"]}}],"response":{"format":"csv"}}
The same table split by sex, 2025. POST to the same URL with {"query":[{"code":"Ursprung","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["Utr","Inr2uS"]}},{"code":"Kon","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["1","2"]}},{"code":"Fodelseland","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["IR","AF"]}},{"code":"Tid","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["2025"]}}],"response":{"format":"csv"}}
Table notes, including the 2025 privacy adjustment: https://statistikdatabasen.scb.se/api/v2/tables/TAB6772/metadata?lang=en
Sweden's total population, 2018. POST to https://api.scb.se/OV0104/v1/doris/en/ssd/BE/BE0101/BE0101A/BefolkningNy with {"query":[{"code":"Region","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["00"]}},{"code":"ContentsCode","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["BE0101N1"]}},{"code":"Tid","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["2018"]}}],"response":{"format":"csv"}}
Sweden's total population, 2025. POST to https://api.scb.se/OV0104/v1/doris/en/ssd/BE/BE0101/BE0101A/BefolkningR1860NCKM with {"query":[{"code":"Alder","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["TotSA"]}},{"code":"Kon","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["TotSa"]}},{"code":"Tid","selection":{"filter":"item","values":["2025"]}}],"response":{"format":"csv"}}; SCB's release on the 2025 figures: https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population-and-living-conditions/population-composition-and-development/population-statistics/pong/statistical-news/population-statistics-year-2025-publish-1
Mother-tongue tuition by language, 2025/26 (Skolverket, Grundskolan, Elever, Riksnivå, Tabell 8 B, XLSX): https://siris.skolverket.se/siris/sitevision_doc.getFile?p_id=554258, listed on https://www.skolverket.se/statistik-och-utvarderingar/statistik-om-forskola-och-skola/sok-statistik-om-forskola-skola-och-vuxenutbildning?sok=SokC&verkform=Grundskola+och+sameskola&omrade=Skolor+och+elever&lasar=2025/26&run=1
The same table for 2020/21 (XLS; choose 2020/21 on the same search page): https://siris.skolverket.se/siris/sitevision_doc.getFile?p_id=550370
Skolverket's descriptive report for 2025/26, with definitions: https://www.skolverket.se/download/18.5f56aa0719d2185a9521012/1774422766089/pdf13391.pdf
SCB's language-code list for school reporting, to confirm that Dari (PRS) and Persian (FAS, PES) have separate codes: https://www.scb.se/contentassets/1a4f777b5a5d4cbd860f667ffe1ea3e9/2026-09-10/sprakkoder_2026-08-28.xlsx

Sums and shares are our own arithmetic on the published counts. Because the register is a full count, there are no margins of error to report. Nothing on this page is modelled or projected. The statement that Sweden keeps no official language statistics is reported by Sveriges Radio (https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/6404320). Journalists and analysts who want to quote the figures can find our contact details on the press page, and the wider context is on our heritage-language market page.

Related guides

Questions

How many Iranians live in Sweden?

At the end of 2025, 87,292 people born in Iran were registered in Sweden, and 48,412 people born in Sweden had at least one Iran-born parent (Statistics Sweden). These are counts of country of birth, not of nationality, ethnicity or language.

How many people born in Afghanistan live in Sweden?

68,819 at the end of 2025, up 32.4% from 51,979 in 2018. A further 22,426 people born in Sweden had at least one Afghanistan-born parent, 15,921 of them with two.

How many Sweden-born children have one Iranian parent and one Swedish parent?

In 2025, 16,563 Sweden-born people had one Iran-born parent and one Sweden-born parent: 10,728 with an Iran-born father and 5,835 with an Iran-born mother. The table has no age split, so this includes adults, and we cannot say how many are children.

How many pupils study Persian in Swedish schools?

In 2025/26, 14,571 pupils in compulsory school were reported as entitled to Persian mother-tongue tuition, and 8,076 took part, 55.4% of those entitled (Skolverket). Skolverket does not publish a separate figure for Dari.

How many Persian speakers are there in Sweden?

No one can say from official data. Sweden does not collect language statistics, so the register counts only where people and their parents were born. The school tuition counts are the only language proxy, and they cover only compulsory-school pupils.

Open Azizan — record a story for your child

Updated: 2026-11-03 · By Aida Fard

Hear when azizan is ready

azizan works now in your browser. If you like, leave your email and we will tell you when the full app and the app-store version are ready. Giving your email is optional. Privacy