The country as a whole lost 3.1%. At the 2021 census the region had 254,594 permanent residents, down from 283,689 ten years earlier. In ten years, about 29,000 residents left or were not replaced. Censuses count the permanent residents of each area; the annual estimates in between are less precise.
Florina lost 12.7% of its residents, the fourth-largest fall among the country's regional units. And the decline did not stop: according to the annual estimates, from 1 January 2022 to 1 January 2025 the region lost another 4.1% of its population.
Not everything points down. In 2024 life expectancy at birth was 82.3 years in Western Macedonia and 81.9 nationally, and since 2022 it has been slightly above the national figure every year. In a region of a few hundred thousand people such a gap may be chance, and no source we found explains it.
The region (Kozani, Florina, Kastoria, Grevena) is going through the transition away from lignite, which for decades provided jobs and electricity.
Sources: ELSTAT, Eurostat.
