Increasing population in Scotland

The latest annual review by the Registrar General shows that Scotland's population increased by 16,400 to 5,094,800 last year. There had been a steady decline from the early 1970s, but in recent years that trend has been reversed.
Last year, the increase was partly because of a slight increase in the number of births and fewer deaths, but the main driver has been because in-migrants exceeded out-migrants by 19,800. That migration gain was lower than in 2004, but was still the second highest since current records began in the early 1950s. The number of people coming to live in Scotland from the rest of the UK exceeded the number moving in the opposite direction by 12,500 - and net migration from the rest of the world totalled 7,300. For the second year running, in-migrants from the rest of the UK exceeded out-migrants in every age group.

Of the 30,881 marriages in Scotland in 2005, 25% were ‘tourist weddings’ where neither the bride nor the groom was resident in Scotland. Nearly half of these "tourist weddings" took place at Gretna.