The Scottish Highlands and the island group of Eilean Siar have the lowest population densities at 9/km2 (23/sq mi).

The new organisation is still required under the terms of the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Scotland) Act 1965, to present a Registrar-General's annual report of demographic trends to the Scottish Government.

In conjunction with the rest of the United Kingdom, the National Records for Scotland is also responsible for conducting a decadal census of population.

[3] In the United Kingdom, a census was taken every ten years from 1801 onwards; with the exception of 1941 due to the Second World War.

[11] Places of birth given by respondents to the 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2022 censuses were as follows: The proportion of people residing in Scotland born outside the UK was 10.2% in 2022, compared with 7.0% in 2011, 3.8% in 2001 and 3.0% in 1991.

In the 2011 census:[27] The council areas with at least 90% of the population stating some 'Scottish' national identity were North Lanarkshire, Inverclyde, East Ayrshire and West Dunbartonshire.

[28] The council areas with the highest proportions of people stating 'British' as their only national identity were Argyll and Bute and Shetland, each with 12%.

The 4 most commonly spoken non-English languages at home (by people aged 3 and over) are: Scots (55,817), Polish (54,186), Chinese (27,381), and Urdu (23,394).

[34] At times during the last interglacial period (130,000–70,000 BC) Europe had a climate warmer than today's, and early humans may have made their way to what is now Scotland, though archaeologists have found no traces of this.

[36] Numerous other sites found around Scotland build up a picture of highly mobile boat-using people making tools from bone, stone and antlers, probably with a very low density of population.

[37] Neolithic farming brought permanent settlements, such as the stone house at Knap of Howar on Papa Westray dating from 3500 BC, and greater concentrations of population.

Extensive analyses of Black Loch in Fife indicate that arable land spread at the expense of forest from about 2000 BC until the period of the first century AD Roman advance into lowland Scotland, suggesting an expanding settled population.

Thereafter, there was re-growth of birch, oak and hazel for a period of five centuries, suggesting that the Roman invasions had a negative impact on the native population.

It is likely that the 5th and 6th centuries saw higher mortality rates due to the appearance of bubonic plague, which may have reduced net population.

[43] Compared with the situation after the redistribution of population in the later clearances and the industrial revolution, these numbers would have been relatively evenly spread over the kingdom, with roughly half living north of the Tay.

[44] Perhaps ten per cent of the population lived in one of many burghs that grew up in the later medieval period, mainly in the east and south.

The first reliable information is a census conducted by the Reverend Alexander Webster in 1755, which shows the inhabitants of Scotland as 1,265,380.

With a population of 4.8 million in 1911, Scotland sent 690,000 men to First World War, of whom 74,000 died in combat or from disease, and 150,000 were seriously wounded.

[51] While emigration began to tail off in England and Wales after the First World War,[52] it continued apace in Scotland, with 400,000 Scots, ten per cent of the population, estimated to have left the country between 1921 and 1931.

[53] When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s there were no easily available jobs in the US and Canada and emigration fell to less than 50,000 a year, bringing to an end the period of mass migrations that had opened in the mid-18th century.

[56] However, from 1974 to 2000 there was a natural decrease in population, with both an excess of deaths over births and of emigration over immigration - particularly to the rest of the United Kingdom.

[62]The 2021 United Kingdom census recorded 648,418 people who were born in Scotland but now living in England and Wales (1.1% of the total population).

[62] Similarly, since 2004 there had also been a growing influx of arrivals from the new EU accession states such as Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania and Latvia, contributing to the recent growth of the population.