The number of people acquiring the citizenship of a European country has increased massively compared to a decade ago. Experts say that the trend has accelerated in recent years due various factors.
The number of people who acquired the citizenship of an EU country in 2024 increased by 55 per cent compared to 2014.
In 2024, almost 1.2 million people were granted citizenship in EU countries, compared to 762,100 in 2014, according to the EU statistical office Eurostat. The data refers to citizenship acquisition by the resident population, not by other routes such as ancestry or marriage. Even related to 2023, Eurostat recorded a surge by 12 per cent in 2024.
The vast majority of new citizenships were handed out by Germany (288,700), Spain (252,500) and Italy (217,400), followed by France (103,700) and Sweden (63,000).
“When we zoom out a bit and look at the last 17 years… we see that the numbers have been increasing mostly gradually, but more intensely since 2021,” says Maarten Vink, Co-director of the Global Citizenship Observatory at the European University Institute in Florence.
Several factors contributed to these developments, Vink explains in a blog post.
“Citizenship acquisition rates are driven, first of all, by demographic factors, such as the arrival of immigrant groups who may be assumed to be particularly interested in naturalising,” he says.
Current citizenship numbers thus reflect the arrival of refugees from Syria in 2015, who are now eligible for naturalisation. In 2024, Syrian nationals accounted for 29 per cent of naturalisations in Germany, 20 per cent in Austria and 16 per cent in Sweden.
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Professor Vink says “there is also still a Brexit effect”. “While we are clearly over the peak of 30 thousand Brexit naturalisations in 2019, there were still more than 10 thousand British nationals who acquired a European citizenship in 2024. Compared with the few thousand pre-2016 British naturalisations, this remains a substantial increase,” he added.
“Once UK citizens stopped being European Union citizens, many tried to repair their loss of rights by acquiring the citizenship of an EU member state (mainly Irish citizenship through descent),” says Vink, which he says gave those Britons their EU rights back
“The payoff of acquiring national citizenship is strongly determined by the EU citizenship benefits,” he says.
In Denmark and Cyprus, Britons were the largest groups of non-EU nationals to acquire citizenship in 2024, and in Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia and Switzerland they were among the top five.
In 2024 Germany passed the citizenship ‘modernisation’ law which reduced from eight to five years the residency requirement to naturalise and allowed dual citizenship (previously possible only for EU citizens). According to Professor Vink, this could have played a role in the number of naturalisations among Turkish nationals, which more than doubled in Germany in 2024, from 10,735 in 2023 to 22,520 in 2024.
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Sweden was the country with the highest naturalisation rate, the number of people acquiring citizenship relative to the number of foreign residents, followed by and Spain.
However, Professor Vink says this figure should be read “with a healthy dose of caution” as Eurostat “includes all modes of acquisitions and not just naturalisations” compared “to all non-nationals rather than only those eligible for naturalisation.”
“Sweden’s high rate surely reflects a citizenship policy that (until now, as changes are being passed into law) provided a highly accessible pathway to citizenship for immigrants. And, by contrast, the low rates in the Baltic states, Bulgaria and Austria reflect restrictive pathways to citizenship for foreign residents,” he commented.
Largest increases in Denmark and Germany
The overall increase in naturalisations in 2024 compared to the previous year was due to more naturalisations in absolute terms in Germany (88,900 more than in 2023), Spain (12,300) and France (6,400), while significant declines were observed in Romania (minus 8,500) and Sweden (minus 4,800).
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In Sweden, 63,000 people were granted citizenship in 2024 compared to 67,800 in 2023. This followed a peak of 92,200 in 2022, but the number is still much higher than the 43,500 in 2014.
In relative terms, the largest increase was recorded in Denmark (86 per cent), with a total of 6,300 citizenship granted compared to 3,400 in 2023.
Across the bloc the vast majority of people acquiring citizenship were from outside the EU (88 per cent).
Other major increases were recorded in Slovakia (59 per cent), Germany (44 per cent) and Malta (39 per cent), while the largest declines occurred in Romania (minus 68 per cent), Estonia and Hungary.
Despite restrictions on dual citizenship, Austria also welcomed more citizens, with 13,000 naturalisations in 2024 compared to 11,900 in 2023 and 7,600 ten years earlier.
In Norway and Switzerland, the number of naturalisations declined in 2024 relative to 2023 but was higher than in 2014. Norway granted citizenship to 27,500 people in 2024, a drop from 37,300 in 2023 but more than 15,900 in 2014. For Switzerland the decline was from 41,200 in 2023 to 39,900 in 2024, and 32,800 recorded ten years earlier.
The largest groups of new EU citizens were from Syria (110,100), Morocco (97,100), and Albania (48,000), followed by Turkey (41,300) and Romania (39,900).
