The number of foreign nationals registered as residing in the Czech Republic decreased slightly at the end of last year to 1.066 million, down by 50,414 year-on-year, according to information published by the Czech Statistical Office (CSU) today.
Foreign nationals accounted for 9.8% of the country’s population, down from 10.3% a year earlier, which was the highest level ever registered.
The largest national group, despite a slight decline, is Ukrainians, as in previous years; about 575,000 of them had a residence permit in the Czech Republic as of the end of 2023. This was followed by Slovaks and Vietnamese. One-fifth of foreign nationals in the Czech Republic are from EU countries.
According to the statistics, more than two-thirds of the foreign nationals in the Czech Republic last year were here on the basis of some type of temporary residence. Nearly 350,000 had permanent residence permits and 2,515 were granted international protection as asylum or subsidiary protection.
“The order of the most represented nationalities in the statistics of foreigners with a residence permit has not changed significantly recently,” said the CSU statisticians. According to the data 71.4% of all foreign nationals with a residence permit in the Czech Republic were citizens from the three most populous groups: Ukrainians, Slovaks and Vietnamese.
However, their numbers have changed compared to 2022. While the number of Slovaks increased by 1,917 to 119,182, and of Vietnamese by 1,443 to 67,783, the number of Ukrainians decreased by 61,835 to 574,447.
Russians were again the fourth largest national group, but their number had decreased by about 2,500 year-on-year, to 40,990. Romanians were the next largest with over 20,000, ahead of Bulgaria, Poland, Germany and Mongolia. Compared to 2022, the numbers of Romanians and Mongolians had increased most significantly, while the number of Russians and Germans saw the biggest drop.
Ukrainian citizens, who now make up the largest group of foreigners in the country, started coming to the Czech Republic in the early 1990s, mainly to work, but in low numbers at the time. Their number increased over time, and by the end of 2022 had reached 636,000, almost 60% of the total number of foreign nationals in the Czech Republic.
In 2022, due to the arrival of mostly women from war-torn Ukraine, the number of women among the foreign population of the Czech Republic increased significantly. For the first time in the history of monitoring migration statistics, women formed a majority (51.1%).
In 2023, although the ratio returned in favour of men, the share of women remained higher than the years before the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war; last year, women made up 49.3% of the foreign population, compared with 43.5% two years earlier.
According to CSU, the number of foreign nationals in Czech schools has also increased in recent years due to the war in Ukraine. “A sharp year-on-year increase occurred in the 2022/2023 school year, especially among primary school pupils. However, in the 2023/2024 school year, the total number of foreign nationals attending primary schools decreased markedly compared to the previous year, while the number of foreign students in secondary schools rose significantly,” the statisticians added.
According to the Czech Statistical Office, foreign nationals accounted for 19% of employees in the Czech Republic last year, with 942,238 employed. The number of foreign employees increased by 3.9% year-on-year to 823,945, and the number of foreign nationals with trade licenses increased by 6% to 118,383.
