Birmingham: 43% White British today, projected under 15% by 2051

Correction, 7 September 2026. Three rows of the projection table were pre-recalibration output and are now re-derived from the projection data: 2031 reads 32.8% where it read 31.7%, 2041 22.9% where it read 20.1%, and 2061 9.1% where it read 4.7%.

Four more figures changed. Birmingham’s 2021 Christian share is 36.2%, not 29.9%: the 29.9 was the raw Census Muslim share, and the two were crossed. The claim that the Muslim share had already overtaken the Christian one is withdrawn, because it is false on either scaling, 31.8% against 36.2% renormalised or 29.9% against 34.0% raw (Census 2021 TS030). The Muslim majority crossing is dated to the middle of the 2040s, later than this piece previously placed it, on 47.5% in 2041 and 53.5% in 2051. Arrivals from outside the UK in the year before the Census are 1.2% of the population, not 2.3%.

One claim is withdrawn outright: Birmingham’s decade fall was not the fastest of any English city over 500,000 people. Manchester fell 10.6 points against Birmingham’s 10.2.

53% White British in 2011. 43% in 2021. The trajectory does not stop.

Census 2021. Birmingham. 42.9% White British. Down from 53.1% ten years earlier. Ten percentage points. One decade. Of the English local authorities with more than 500,000 residents, only Manchester fell faster, by 10.6 points.

The numbers going forward:

Year	White British
2011	53.1%
2021	42.9%
2031	32.8%
2041	22.9%
2051	14.9%
2061	9.1%

Four things drive this.

Fertility. White British total fertility rate nationally: 1.31 children per woman, computed from ONS 2024 births by ethnicity against Census 2021 women aged 15 to 44. Pakistani: 2.52. Birmingham’s Pakistani population is 17.0%. That fertility gap compounds every year. Every cohort is less White British than the last.

Age structure. Birmingham’s White British population skews older. The younger cohorts are already majority non-White-British. White British pupils are 24.7% of the city’s school roll in 2024/25, against 42.9% of the population. The demographic wave is already in the system.

White flight. Birmingham gained 71,877 residents between the two Censuses and lost 79,006 White British ones, from 570,217 to 491,211. Every other broad group grew. Census 2021 origin-destination data is not in this site’s dataset, so this piece names no destination.

International settlement. Birmingham is a major settlement city. 1.2% of the population had moved to it from outside the UK in the year before Census 2021. South Asian and African countries dominate the recent flow: Pakistan and India together account for 42.3% of National Insurance registrations to overseas nationals in Birmingham, with Nigeria, Bangladesh, China and Eritrea behind them.

The models agree on direction. The Hamilton-Perry model projects 14.9% White British by 2051, revised up from 10.7% when the model was recalibrated on 13 August 2026: the settings it used before were projecting change too fast. The cohort-component model, which assumes ethnic fertility rates converge partway to the national mean, projects 21.7% on the same year. The true outcome sits between them. Both agree Birmingham passed majority non-White-British years ago; the question is how fast it continues.

Religion. Birmingham’s Muslim population: 31.8% in 2021. Christian: 36.2%. Both are Census 2021 TS030 shares of the residents who answered the religion question, which is the scaling the place page uses. The projection puts Muslim at 47.5% in 2041 and 53.5% in 2051, so the crossing falls in the middle of the 2040s. First major English city.

Birmingham is not the exception. It is the preview. Leicester, Luton, Slough: similar trajectories. Blackburn with Darwen: projected minority White British by 2027. The dynamics are national. Birmingham just gets there first.

Source: Census 2021 custom dataset (direct observations, 20 ethnic groups). Hamilton-Perry v8.0 single-year CCR model, SNPP-constrained, recalibrated on an out-of-sample test (MAE 1.56pp, bias +0.05pp). Census 2011 DC2101EW (observed, not proportionally split). Migration and country-of-birth figures from Census 2021 via NOMIS and DWP National Insurance registrations. School roll from DfE School Census 2024/25. The backcast score previously quoted here has been withdrawn; it measured the model’s own guardrails rather than its accuracy. See the methodology.