How old is your town?

The distribution

How far apart the localities are

Line up the 3,181 localities by median age and eight in ten fall between 38 and 50. The young tail is short and steep: only 89 localities have a median age under 35, and 24 under 30. The old tail is longer: 286 localities have passed 50, and 39 have passed 55.

The two tails are not mirror images. The young localities are few but large: Slobozia Bradului has 10,847 registered residents, Bărbulești in Ialomița 9,215, Vâlcele in Covasna 6,327. Most are communes with a large Roma population, where families are big and start early. The old localities are, on the contrary, many and small: Bătrâna has 109 registered people, Cerbăl, also in Hunedoara, 388, Lăpușnicel in Caraș-Severin 879. They are the mountain and plain villages whose young left, first for the cities and then for other countries, while those who stayed aged in place. The 528 localities where people aged 80 or over outnumber children under 10 hold, together, a little over a million people, under 5% of the country; they are 517 communes and 11 towns, and not a single city.

The big cities all sit close to the middle. Iași is the youngest of them, with a median age of 43.2; Bucharest is at 45.0, Cluj-Napoca at 44.5, Timișoara at 46.5, and Brăila, at 49.1, is the oldest large city. In 1992 all of them were between 30 and 35. The cities held the middle of the distribution because they keep receiving young people from the villages, and over the same period the villages that supplied them moved into the old tail.

The ends

The youngest and the oldest

The lists below include only localities with at least 1,000 registered people, so that they are not dominated by villages where a few families can move the median by years. Click a name and the map goes there.

The figure on the right is the median age in years on 1 January 2026. Without the 1,000-person threshold, the oldest locality in the country is Bătrâna in Hunedoara, with a median age of 61.8 and 109 registered people.

The counties

Where the old have overtaken the children

A county looks different seen through its localities than through its total. Vâlcea has a median age of 48.6, the highest in the country, but the more telling figure is another one: in 73 of its 89 localities, people aged 80 or over outnumber children under 10. In Teleorman it is 55 of 97. At the other end, Suceava, Constanța, Covasna and Ilfov have no such locality at all, and Suceava is also the county with the lowest median age, 40.4.

A county’s median age is computed from the sum of its localities. Bucharest appears as a single locality.

Thirty-four years

What has changed since 1992

In 1992, for every 100 people aged 65 and over, Romania had 210 children under 15. In 2026 it has 73. For every 100 children, the country had eight people aged 80 or over; now it has 30. The share of the household-founding generation, those aged 20 to 39, has fallen from 29% to 24%. Each locality’s profile shows the same three figures, next to the county’s and the country’s, so you can see whether your locality moved at the same pace or at another.

Not all of them aged. Of the 2,946 localities that existed in 1992, 400 have a lower median age today than they had then. The most striking rejuvenation is in Dragu, in Sălaj, from 48.1 to 25.9. The steepest ageing happened in single-industry towns and in villages under the mountains: Motru, in Gorj, went from 24.6 to 47.0, and Voineasa, in Vâlcea, from 29.3 to 54.3. The 235 localities missing from the 1992 map are communes created after that date by splitting from others.

An essential caveat

The registered address is not where you live

Every figure on this page counts people by the address on their identity card. The National Institute of Statistics states plainly that the population by domicile takes no account of usual residence, nor of the length or reason of any absence from that address. Someone who moved to London or to Cluj but kept the card registered at their parents’ house is counted at home.

The difference is large. On 1 January 2025, Romania had 21.75 million people with a registered address in the country and 19.04 million actual inhabitants, the resident population used for European comparisons. The two figures differ by almost 2.7 million. The resident population, however, is not published by locality and single year of age, so the map can only be drawn from registered addresses.

On the other hand, precisely because it counts identity cards, the figure says something about the formal tie to a place: how many people keep a commune’s address and, with it, the right to vote there in local elections. The indicator describes the age of the people registered in a locality; the age of those present there on an ordinary day remains unknown.