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What you should know about this indicator

This data counts people who left Norway for overseas countries outside Europe — overwhelmingly North America.

From 1867, they were registered by the police when departing on emigrant ships from Norwegian ports; earlier figures were compiled from reports by parish priests. People moving to other European countries were not recorded, and some overseas emigrants were also missed, for example those who traveled via ports in other countries.

There is no data for most years before 1836, when records were sparse, and none for 1941–1945, during the German occupation of Norway.

The series ends in 1950, because from 1951 onward Statistics Norway counted all emigration rather than only emigration to overseas countries.

Annual share of Norway's population emigrating outside Europe
Only emigration to overseas destinations outside Europe is counted — mostly to North America. People moving to other European countries are not included.
Source
Statistics Norway (2016) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
July 23, 2026
Date range
1821–1950
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Statistics Norway – Historical statistics of Norway

A collection of long-run statistical tables for Norway, published online by Statistics Norway as a continuation of its book Historical Statistics 1994. The tables cover population, industry, and society, with some series reaching back to the 17th century.

Retrieved on
July 23, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.ssb.no/a/en/histstat/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Statistics Norway. Historical statistics, table 3.13: Population, births, deaths, marriages, migration and population increase, 1735-2015.

A collection of long-run statistical tables for Norway, published online by Statistics Norway as a continuation of its book Historical Statistics 1994. The tables cover population, industry, and society, with some series reaching back to the 17th century.

Retrieved on
July 23, 2026
Retrieved from
https://www.ssb.no/a/en/histstat/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Statistics Norway. Historical statistics, table 3.13: Population, births, deaths, marriages, migration and population increase, 1735-2015.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We calculated this indicator by dividing the number of emigrations by the population of Norway at the start of the same year, reported in the same source table.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Annual share of Norway's population emigrating outside Europe”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from Statistics Norway. Retrieved from https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe [online resource]

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Statistics Norway (2016) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Statistics Norway (2016) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Annual share of Norway's population emigrating outside Europe” [dataset]. Statistics Norway, “Historical statistics of Norway” [original data]. Retrieved July 23, 2026 from https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe

Download

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://data-add-longrun-norway.owid.pages.dev/grapher/annual-share-of-norways-population-emigrating-outside-europe.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear