Muslim residents in Italy 2026, by country of origin

Muslim citizens residing in Italy in 2026, by country of origin

Italy has long been seen as the heartland of European Catholicism, yet it is also home to a large and steadily growing Muslim population. In 2026, around 2.7 million Muslims live in the country, about 4.9% of the total population, of whom roughly 1.6 million are foreign-born residents and the remainder Italian citizens. Moroccans are by far the largest single group of origin, numbering just over 400,000, a community that has put down deep roots since the migration waves of the 1980s and 1990s. This shifting religious make-up sits alongside the steep fall in Catholic practice that we document in our weekly church attendance in Italy analysis, where regular Mass-going has roughly halved since 2001. Together, the two trends are quietly reshaping the religious landscape of a country still strongly associated with the Vatican. The result is a striking dual identity, in which the symbols of Catholicism remain everywhere while the lived religious reality grows steadily more plural.

The country-of-origin picture is strikingly plural. After Morocco come two fast-rising South Asian communities, with almost 180,000 Muslims from Bangladesh and nearly 170,000 from Pakistan, both of which have now overtaken the roughly 153,000 Muslims of Albanian origin. Beyond these four leading groups, sizeable communities trace their roots to Egypt, Tunisia, Senegal and Nigeria, alongside many smaller national groups from across North Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The result is one of the most internally diverse Muslim populations in Europe, layered over four decades of migration. No single nationality dominates the way one might expect, and the balance between the major groups has shifted noticeably as older flows from the Maghreb and the Balkans give way to newer arrivals from the Indian subcontinent. That layering of waves means a single neighbourhood mosque may serve worshippers whose families left Casablanca, Tirana, Dhaka and Lahore within the same few decades, each bringing distinct languages and customs.

These estimates come from the ISMU Foundation, which models religious affiliation from official ISTAT residence data, since Italy does not record religion in its census. On that basis, Muslims are now the single largest religious group among Italy's foreign residents, at about 30%, having recently overtaken Eastern Orthodox Christians. The contrast with the wider foreign-resident faith mix is set out in our religious affiliation of foreigners in Italy analysis, which shows Christians of all denominations still outnumbering Muslims overall. Because religion is inferred rather than counted directly, totals vary between sources, and the figures here should be read as well-grounded estimates rather than exact counts. The headline ranking of origin countries, however, is consistent across the main studies.

Islam is not entirely new to Italy. Arab rule shaped Sicily and parts of the south for more than two centuries in the early Middle Ages, leaving traces in language, food and architecture. The modern community, however, dates only from the 1980s, when migrant workers began arriving from North Africa, and it has since grown into one of the country's most significant religious minorities. Understanding where today's Muslims come from is therefore central to understanding how Italian society is changing, even though the people behind the numbers are overwhelmingly recent arrivals and their Italian-born children rather than heirs of that medieval past. The distance between the two eras is part of what makes the modern story so distinctive, and why the country-of-origin data matters more than any appeal to deep history.

Muslim Residents in Italy by Country of Origin: Full Table

The table makes the concentration at the top clear. The four leading countries of origin, Morocco, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Albania, together account for more than half of all foreign-born Muslims in Italy, with Morocco alone supplying roughly a quarter. Below them, a long tail of mid-sized communities from Egypt, Tunisia, Senegal and Nigeria each contributes between about 3% and 8%, while the residual category of other countries, more than 340,000 people, captures the remarkable breadth of smaller national groups. These figures count foreign-born residents only and exclude the several hundred thousand Muslims who now hold Italian citizenship, which is why the foreign-born total of about 1.6 million is lower than the all-in estimate of roughly 2.7 million. Read alongside the citizen estimates, the table shows both the scale and the diversity of Italy's Muslim presence. Counting both groups together is the only way to capture the community's true weight in Italian society today.

Share of Italy's Muslim Residents by Country of Origin

Expressed as shares, the breakdown shows just how plural the community is. Moroccans make up about a quarter of all foreign-born Muslims, the only group above 20%, while Bangladeshis and Pakistanis sit just above 10% each and Albanians a little below. No other single nationality reaches 8%, and the combined share of all the smaller communities, grouped here as other countries, is larger than that of any individual group bar Morocco. This fragmentation matters: it means Italy's Muslims do not form a single cultural bloc but a mosaic of languages, traditions and schools of practice. Seen against the global picture in our countries with the largest Muslim population analysis, Italy is a comparatively small but unusually varied Muslim society, shaped more by the geography of recent migration than by any one historic homeland or colonial tie. In that respect Italy differs sharply from France or Britain, whose Muslim populations are dominated by one or two large communities rooted in former empire.

How Many Muslims Live in Italy? Estimates Compared

Counting Muslims in Italy is not straightforward, because the national census does not ask about religion, so every total is a model-based estimate. The ISMU Foundation puts the foreign-born Muslim population at around 1.6 million, while CESNUR offers a higher all-in figure of about 2.28 million, and the broadest estimates, combining foreign residents with naturalised and Italian-born Muslims, reach roughly 2.7 million, the figure most often cited for 2026. A lower bound of about 1.5 million appears in more conservative studies that count only the most clearly identified communities. The Italian-citizen component alone, examined in our Italian citizens belonging to religious minorities analysis, adds several hundred thousand people. The gap between these numbers is not a sign of poor data so much as a reflection of how religion has to be inferred from nationality and origin. For that reason every figure quoted here should be read as a careful estimate rather than a headcount, even where the broad ranking is secure.

The choice of estimate depends on what is being measured. If the question is how many foreign residents are Muslim, the ISMU figure of about 1.6 million is the right one, and it is the basis for the country-of-origin breakdown in this report. If the question is how many people in Italy are culturally or religiously Muslim regardless of passport, the higher 2.7 million figure is more appropriate. The roughly 566,000 Muslims who hold Italian citizenship, a number reported by Statista and CESNUR, increasingly tip the balance toward the larger totals as second-generation Muslims born in Italy come of age. For consistency, the charts in this report focus on foreign-born residents by origin, while the headline population share of 4.9% uses the broader all-in definition that includes citizens. Keeping the two definitions distinct is essential, because confusing foreign residents with the wider Muslim population is the single most common error in public debate on the subject.

How Italy's Muslim Population Has Grown Since 2010

The growth of Italy's Muslim population has been steady rather than explosive. The foreign-born Muslim total rose from around 1.05 million in 2010 to about 1.4 million by 2016 and roughly 1.6 million by the mid-2020s, an increase of more than half in fifteen years. Three forces have driven the rise: labour migration, especially from Morocco and later from South Asia; family reunification, as established migrants brought spouses and children; and a growing number of births to Muslim families already settled in Italy. The trajectory mirrors the broader expansion of Islam across the continent that we track in our world religions analysis. What was once a community of single male workers has matured into a settled, family-based and increasingly Italian-born population, even as the headline foreign-resident numbers have levelled off in recent years. The plateau in raw numbers can mask the deeper change underneath, as the share of the community that was born in Italy quietly rises with every passing year.

The pace of growth has clearly slowed since 2020. Tighter migration controls, the disruption of the pandemic and a maturing community have all flattened the curve, so that the increase between 2022 and 2026 is modest compared with the rapid expansion of the 2000s and early 2010s. At the same time, the composition of growth has changed: a rising share of the increase now comes from births and naturalisation rather than new arrivals, meaning the community is becoming more Italian even as its overall size stabilises. This shift from immigration-driven to home-grown growth is significant, because it points to a future in which Italy's Muslims are defined less by their countries of origin and more by their place within Italian society itself, much as earlier waves of internal migrants once were. The history of the southern Italians who moved north in the post-war boom offers a reminder of how quickly an outsider community can become an integral part of the national fabric.

Where Muslims Live in Italy, by Region

Italy's Muslims are far from evenly spread. About two-thirds live in the north, drawn over the decades to the industrial heartland and its demand for labour. Lombardy, centred on Milan, is home to the single largest concentration, followed by Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Lazio and Piedmont. The south and the islands, despite being the first point of arrival for many migrants crossing the Mediterranean, host comparatively few long-term Muslim residents, because work and settled communities are concentrated further north. This geography shapes everything from the location of mosques and prayer rooms to local politics and schooling, and it broadly tracks where Italy's foreign population as a whole has settled, a pattern that fits the wider distribution explored in our world population analysis of how people cluster around economic opportunity rather than spreading evenly across a territory. The same logic that drew earlier internal migrants to Turin and Milan now draws Muslim families to the cities and towns where work and housing are most readily found.

The Demographic Profile of Italy's Muslims

Italy's Muslim population is markedly younger than the country as a whole, which is one of the oldest in the world. Roughly a quarter are under 18, and another third are aged 18 to 34, so that well over half are under 35, against a national median age in the mid-forties. Only about one in ten Muslims is aged 55 or over, reflecting the relatively recent arrival of most communities and the strong role of young families. In terms of religious practice, the community is overwhelmingly Sunni, at about 98%, with a small Shia minority, a homogeneity that contrasts with the denominational variety seen among other minority faiths such as the groups in our non-Catholic believers in Spain analysis. This youthful, family-oriented profile means the Muslim share of Italy's population is likely to keep rising even if migration stays flat. A young population today tends to mean a larger population tomorrow, regardless of how many new arrivals cross the border.

Islam Is Now the Largest Single Faith Among Foreigners

One of the most significant recent shifts is that Muslims have become the largest single religious group among Italy's foreign residents. At about 30%, Islam has edged ahead of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, at roughly 29%, which had long held the top spot thanks to the large Romanian, Ukrainian and Moldovan communities. Catholics make up about 17% of foreigners, with smaller shares for those of no religion, other Christian denominations, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism. Taken together, Christians of all kinds still outnumber Muslims among foreigners, but no single Christian tradition is now as large as Islam. The same pattern of practice outside the Catholic mainstream appears among Italian citizens too, as our Italian citizens belonging to Protestantism by denomination analysis shows for the country's home-grown religious minorities. Together these strands show that religious change in Italy is being driven from two directions at once, by immigration on one side and by the slow erosion of Catholic practice on the other.

Rising and Falling Muslim Communities, 2018 to 2025

Behind the stable headline total lies a striking reshuffle of the leading groups. Between 2018 and 2025, the number of Muslims of Pakistani origin grew by more than half, and the Bangladeshi community expanded by around a quarter, as labour migration and family reunification from South Asia accelerated. Over the same period, the Moroccan community edged down by roughly 8% and the Albanian community fell by about a third. The decline of the older Maghreb and Balkan groups is partly real and partly statistical: many long-settled Moroccans and Albanians have taken Italian citizenship and so no longer appear in the foreign-resident counts, much as religious affiliation can shift across generations in the way our religion in England and Wales analysis documents. The net effect is a Muslim population whose centre of gravity is steadily moving from the Mediterranean toward the Indian subcontinent. It is a quiet but consequential rebalancing of the whole community's character.

Italy's Muslim Share in European Perspective

In the European context, Italy is a middling case. Muslims make up about 4.9% of its population, below the European average of roughly 6.8% and well under France, where the Muslim share is closer to 8% to 10%, and Germany, at around 6.5%. Italy sits nearer to Spain, where Muslims account for a little over 4%, reflecting a shared history of more recent, labour-driven Muslim migration compared with the older post-colonial flows into France and the guest-worker waves into Germany. This places Italy among the western European countries where Islam is a significant but not yet large minority, a position we set in its regional frame in our religion in Europe analysis. Because Italy's Muslim population is younger and more fertile than the native population, its share is widely expected to keep climbing toward the continental average over the coming decades. Whether it eventually matches France and Germany will depend as much on policy and the economy as on demography alone.

Projections reinforce the point. Because the Muslim population is younger and has more children on average than Italy's rapidly ageing native majority, demographers expect its share to keep rising even under low-migration scenarios. The precise path depends on future immigration policy, naturalisation rates and the pace of integration, but the direction of travel is clear. That trajectory places questions of faith, identity and belonging closer to the centre of Italian public life than at any time in the modern era, and it ensures that the country-of-origin breakdown will keep shifting in the years ahead. For now, though, the headline picture is settled: a diverse, young and growing Muslim presence led by Morocco and increasingly shaped by South Asia.

Muslims in Italy by Country of Origin: The Key Numbers

Pulling the figures together, the geography is as telling as the totals. Of the roughly 1.6 million foreign-born Muslims in Italy, well over a million live in the north, with around 288,000 in the centre and about 240,000 across the south and islands. The largest single nationality is Moroccan, at just over 400,000, while the fastest-growing are the South Asian communities from Bangladesh and Pakistan. About 4.9% of Italy's population is Muslim once citizens are included, the community is overwhelmingly Sunni and notably young, and Islam is now the biggest single faith among foreigners. This profile stands in contrast to the steadier, older Catholic populations of northern Europe profiled in our Catholic population in Germany analysis, underlining how differently religion is evolving across the continent. In the south, ageing and shrinking Catholic congregations sit alongside young and expanding minority faiths, a contrast that captures the broader story of European religion in a single frame.

Taken together, the data describes a Muslim population that is large, diverse, young and increasingly Italian. A community once defined by Moroccan and Albanian labour migrants is being reshaped by South Asian arrivals and by a growing second generation born on Italian soil. For policymakers, faith organisations and researchers, the key is to read origin, citizenship and practice together rather than relying on any single number, and to track each new ISMU and ISTAT release as the picture evolves. The same caution about identity versus active belief that runs through our belief in God in the UK analysis applies here: counting who descends from a Muslim-majority country is not the same as measuring active faith, and Italy's real religious change will be found in the gap between the two. Reading that gap honestly, rather than reaching for a single alarming or reassuring number, is the only way to understand what is actually happening to faith in Italy.

Frequently Asked Questions: Muslims in Italy