35 million people, and growing toward a peak in the 2060s

Peru is home to 34,934,545 million people, the fourth-largest population in South America. It is still growing. The UN’s medium projection adds nearly 6 million people by 2050, reaching 40.5 million, and has the population peaking at around 41.7 million in 2066¹.

Peru’s own numbers point a little lower. The 2025 census counted 34,157,732 people, about 1 to 1.5% below the UN’s estimate². The national statistics institute, INEI, last projected a peak of about 39.8 million in 2061, built on the previous census³. Either way, Peru has a few decades of growth left, and then it will start to shrink.

Fewer children, and a migration wave that has passed

Peruvian women now have about 1.93 children on average, just under the 2.1 that keeps a population steady in the long run¹. The population keeps growing anyway, because the large generations born in earlier decades are now raising families of their own.

For a few years migration added a big push. Net migration peaked at about 339,000 people in 2018, but by 2026 it had dropped to around 7,000¹. The 2025 census counted 1,053,000 foreign residents in total², so the people who arrived during the wave are now part of the population. With migration back to a trickle, births and deaths decide the rest of the curve.

Nearly a third of Peruvians live in Lima

Lima is by far Peru’s largest city. Its metropolitan area is home to 10,129,708 people, 29.7% of the country, according to the census². Nearly one in three Peruvians lives in or around the capital.

Lima sits on the dry Pacific coast, which puts a third of the country in the place where water is scarcest.

Two-thirds of the people, 2% of the water

The Andes split Peru in two. On the western, Pacific side live about two-thirds of all Peruvians, yet that side has only about 2% of the country’s renewable water. On the eastern side, draining into the Amazon, the balance is reversed: about 98% of the water and around 30% of the people⁴.

Lima feels that mismatch most. The Rímac River, which supplies the city, provides only about 125 cubic metres of water per person per year, a level classed as absolute scarcity⁴.

Melting ice makes it worse. Peru holds about 68% of the world’s tropical glaciers, and about 56% of their area has disappeared since 1962⁵. Those glaciers act as the coast’s water tank, releasing meltwater in the dry season when rivers run low. As they shrink, the dry months on the coast are likely to get drier, just as the coastal cities keep growing.

The second-largest share of the Amazon

East of the Andes, Peru holds the second-largest expanse of Amazon rainforest after Brazil¹⁰. About 67.5 million hectares of humid Amazon forest were still standing in 2024⁶. That includes Manu National Park, where the Andes meet the Amazon.

That forest is still being cut, and the loss is growing. Peru lost 150,602 hectares of Amazon forest in 2024, more than 400 hectares a day, up from 132,210 hectares the year before⁶. It’s part of the same rate of deforestation that raises the question of when the rainforests could be gone.

Peru also mines about 12% of the world’s copper⁸.

A footprint the country can still cover, for now

If everyone in the world lived like the average Peruvian, humanity would need 1.58 Earths⁹. Carbon from fossil fuels is the biggest slice, at 0.49 Earths: the forest needed to absorb the carbon dioxide from transport, power and industry. Cropland follows at 0.42 and grazing land at 0.29, the farmland and pasture behind what Peruvians eat⁹.

At home, Peru still has more than it uses. Its ecosystems renew about 3.52 global hectares per person, while each Peruvian uses 2.37, which makes the country an ecological creditor⁹. Much of that surplus is the Amazon forest, which means every hectare cleared there also shrinks the margin.

Where Peru is heading

Peru’s population will most likely peak sometime in the 2060s, somewhere around 40 million, with the 2025 census suggesting the UN’s 41.7 million may prove a little high.

More people will mostly mean more people on the dry Pacific coast, where the water is already scarce and the glaciers that back it up are melting. So where Peruvians live, and where the water is, will likely matter as much as how many of them there are.