On 31 December 2024 there were 195,523 Bangladeshi citizens legally resident in Italy, 16.9% more than a year earlier. It is the country’s fifth-largest non-EU community, 5.1% of the total — not counting the thousands of people of Bangladeshi origin who have become Italian citizens.
A young, mostly male community
The average age is 31.3 and more than 70% are aged 18–44. Men make up 76.7%, women 23.3%. There are 28,417 minors, and 3,785 babies were born in 2024 — a birth rate of 19.6 per thousand, among the highest.
Where they live
46.1% live in the north, 31.7% in the centre and 22.2% in the south and islands. Lazio is home to 22% of the community; the Rome metropolitan area alone has 37,905. Next come Lombardy (15.1%), Veneto (10.8%), Campania (8.5%) and Sicily (6.8%).
Why they come
In 2024 there were 28,045 new permits, the highest of any community: two in three for asylum or protection, one in five for family reasons, one in ten for work.
A forty-year story
The first pioneers arrived in the 1980s; with the regularisations of 1986, 1990 and the early 2000s the community settled. Until the late 1990s, 92% lived in Rome; then many moved to the industrial north-east, and some, after the 2008 crisis, to the United Kingdom.
