# How old is your town?

*Marius Comper · 8 September 2026 · [Interactive version](https://mariuscomper.uk/varsta-localitatii/en/) · [Ediția în română](https://mariuscomper.uk/varsta-localitatii/)*

Romania’s median age is 44: half of its people are younger, half older. But Romania also has 3,181 localities, each with an age of its own. In Slobozia Bradului, a commune in Vrancea, half the population is under 18. In Bătrâna, a commune in the mountains of Hunedoara, half is 61 or older. Between those two ends, **528 localities had, on 1 January 2026, more registered people aged 80 or over than children under 10**. In 1992 there were 9. The interactive version colours every locality by its median age, computed from the number of people of each single year of age in the register of domiciles, and shows for each locality its age fingerprint, its pyramid by sex and its path from 1992 to 2026.

- **528** of 3,181 localities had, on 1 January 2026, more people aged 80 and over than children under 10.
- **9** of the 2,946 localities that existed on 1 January 1992 were in the same situation then.
- **33.2 → 44.3** years: Romania’s median age, 1992 against 2026.
- **17.5 – 61.8** years: the lowest and the highest median age among all localities, in 2026.

## 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 youngest and the oldest

Only localities with at least 1,000 registered people; median age in years on 1 January 2026.

Youngest: Slobozia Bradului (Vrancea) 17.5 · Bărbulești (Ialomița) 19.3 · Vâlcele (Covasna) 21.6 · Voitinel (Suceava) 24.5 · Augustin (Brașov) 24.6 · Budila (Brașov) 25.2.

Oldest: Necșești (Teleorman) 58.3 · Glăvile (Vâlcea) 58.0 · Tomești (Hunedoara) 57.8 · Uda-Clocociov (Teleorman) 57.4 · Saelele (Teleorman) 56.7 · Slobozia Mândra (Teleorman) 56.3.

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.

## Where the old have overtaken the children

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. The full county table is in the interactive version.

## 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 8 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%.

Not every locality aged. Of the 2,946 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 registered address is not where you live

Every figure 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. On 1 January 2025, Romania had 21.75 million people with a registered address in the country and 19.04 million actual inhabitants. The two figures differ by almost 2.7 million. Those who left are mostly young, so villages look younger on paper than they are on the ground, and a count of the people actually present would most likely find more localities where the old outnumber the children.

## Method and sources

The data come from table POP107D of the National Institute of Statistics’ TEMPO-Online database (population by domicile on 1 January, by single year of age, sex, county and locality, 1992–2026), last updated by INS on 2 April 2026 and downloaded in full on 8 September 2026. The median age is computed from the cumulative distribution by single year of age, with linear interpolation inside the year of age where the halfway point falls. The headline figure compares people aged 80 and over with children aged 0–9; in 10 localities the groups are equal and are not counted. The resident population comes from table POP105A. The outlines of the 3,181 administrative units come from the dataset “UAT, România (poligon)” of the geo-spatial.org community, based on ANCPI data, version of 26 March 2025, CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. The indicators are descriptive and do not say why.

Sources: http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-online/ · https://geo-spatial.org/descarcare/date/administrative-boundaries/