Spain surpassed in 2025 for the first time the threshold of 10 million residents aged 65 or older, reaching 10,178,625 people, 20.7 percent of the population, after adding 250,257 new members to this age group compared with the previous year, which is equivalent to an increase of 2.5 percent.
These data are collected in the report "A profile of older people in Spain 2026: aging, health and well-being in figures", prepared by the Population Department of the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography (IEGD-CSIC) of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), within the Aging in network initiative.
The study, presented this Tuesday, draws a detailed panorama of aging in Spain through the combination of demographic, health, economic, care and digitalization indicators.
"Old age is no plague. Reaching 65 years of age currently is very different from what it meant for previous generations. The current generations of older people are the first to have completed secondary education, while their predecessors, in many cases, only had access to primary education or had no schooling," the demographer Julio Pérez, researcher at the IEGD-CSIC and coordinator of the report, has pointed out.
The average age of the Spanish population stood at 44.55 years in 2025. In parallel, the number of centenarians grew by 7.1 percent in a single year, rising from 15,911 in 2024 to 17,038, of whom nearly eight out of ten are women.
The projections included in the document estimate that the population aged 65 and over will exceed 16 million in 2046, nearing 30 percent of the total, provided that the demographic assumptions used are maintained.
In this context, Pérez has pointed out that it remains to be determined whether the Spanish public administrations are prepared to respond to the challenge of aging, although he has emphasized that the people themselves are.
The report also confirms the persistence of territorial gaps. In 2025, those over 65 represented 29.1 percent of the population in rural municipalities, compared with 20.0 percent in urban areas. Asturias, Castilla y León and Galicia concentrated the highest regional rates.
Improvement in healthy life expectancy after the pandemic
The document also incorporates Eurostat figures for 2023, which place healthy life expectancy at age 65 at 10.3 years for women and 10.2 for men. Both records improve on those of 2022, although they remain below pre-pandemic levels.
After a decline linked to the impact of COVID-19 from 2020 onward, a partial recovery is observed. In 2023, the figures stand at 10.3 years for women and 10.2 for men, still without reaching the levels before the health crisis.
Self-perceived health, which tends to worsen with age, is slightly higher in men than in women, according to the 2025 data.
"We have always thought that improvements in health are mainly due to advances in medicine, but how people reach old age is also very important. In this area, there has been enormous progress, since these are generations that have received better care and nutrition," Pérez has explained.
Along these lines, the expert has anticipated that the cohorts being born now could reach an average life expectancy close to 100 years. "The average lifespan will be much higher than the current one and will surely reach 100 years," he has added.
On the other hand, the results of the Spain Health Survey 2023 (ESdE) show a high prevalence of chronic conditions among the population aged 65 and over, which intensifies with age. Hypertension, osteoarthritis, and high cholesterol stand out, with differences according to sex and an increase in problems such as dementia and cataracts in the oldest age groups.
Aging housing and obstacles to its rehabilitation
In the residential sphere, the 2025 data indicate that most older people in Spain own the home in which they live, but also that 56.6 percent of households whose reference person is 65 years old or older are located in buildings constructed before 1981. Of these, 20.7 percent have carried out energy efficiency improvements in the last five years, while another 30.3 percent consider that they need them but have not carried them out.
Among the owner-occupied households in this group that require interventions and have not carried them out, 74.1 percent cite the economic cost as the main obstacle. For the team responsible for the study, these results highlight the need to take into account the ability to finance the rehabilitation of the existing housing stock, in addition to homeownership, when analyzing the living conditions of older people.