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Whats the population of all the factions within the Imperium? including civilians. Im guessing about 500 billion but i also got a feeling thats not even close to the actual amount.

Mankind is numbered in the "Countless Trillions"

The birthrate is so high that they literally cannot count them all, nor do they care to.

There are (roughly) a million worlds in the Imperium of Man. Some of them are dotted with cities that can have well over a billion people in every city, others are barely inhabited mining outposts, and you get everything in between.

If you assume the average population comes out to something like the population of modern-day Earth, you wind up with a ballpark estimate of 7,000,000,000,000,000.

The actual number is probably in the Quintillions somewhere, of course with a million planets it would be impossable to conduct a census.

By the time data got to Terra to be added together it would be decades if not centuries old and useless.

Considering the Imperium controls over a million worlds we can expect there to be alot of people around. Is there any information given as to the average pop of the different types of worlds within the imperium? Deathworlds, Hiveworlds, Industrial worlds etc?

A lot.

That's as good as your gonna get, really.

Deathworlds will have variable populations, but it will be relativly low. a few dozen million at most, far less on average.

Hive Worlds can have populations in the Trillions.

Forge Worlds will have less people then Hive Worlds, but they will still have billions of people to work in the manufactories.

Agri-worlds will have the lowest populations, only enough to harvest the trillions of tons of food stuffs that get shipped off world. Possably even as low as 1-3 million.

Throughout the entire Imperium, the entire population of modern-day Earth dies and is born several times over, every day.

500 Billion people is the total population of a few score Hive Worlds, of which such world there are thousands, tens of thousands, in the Imperium.

There's a reason why the Imperium's #1 resource is man-power. They have more people than they really know what to do with. They have so many people that, if they decide to, they can transfer some excess population from a few Hive Worlds (populations of tens of billions) and create a brand-new Hive World (population tens of billions) in a relatively short period of time.

Just a quick calculation. This probably isn't very accurate but its ment to show you the cast scale of the imperium and its population.... I took these stats from the Dark heresy RPG to kinda get the numbers on the worlds... These are all estimates... Anyway here we go.

20% Deathworlds & Feral worlds = 200 000
200 000 (worlds) x 10 000 000 (pop) = 2 000 000 000 000.

2 trillion people live on Deathworlds. Approximately.

An average hive world will have a population above that, and we can presume that around 35% of the Imperiums liveable planets are hiveworlds.

so... 350 000 x 3 000 000 000 000 = 1 050 000 000 000 000 000

Just over 1 Quintillion people live on Hiveworlds. Again this is a really approximate number.

And we are bit over half way

The remaining 55% are all thrown into the "Imperial Worlds" class. Anything from a shrine world to an agri-world or perhaps a death world. Maybe even a paradise world! Who knows. Anyway I figure the average here probably is in the tens of billions. So im going to go with.... Say... 75 billion. Seems like a reasonable number.

550 000 x 75 000 000 000 = 41 250 000 000 000

So around 41 trillion people live on Imperial worlds. This number was really difficult to get an average on so...

That puts the total population around 1.5 Quintillion souls. Thats alot of people!


Again, this was all guess work and I think my numbers were quite low but there you go..

Official: The graves of warriors who have given their lives for the Emperor now outnumber the stars themselves.

Quintillions.

One of the few hard numbers given is the population combined between Terra and Mars is half a trillion.

500 trillion. Not one more, not one less.

Nah, thats just how many people are waiting outside the Imperial Palace trying to get autographs. Eat your heart out Edward

Actually we do have some data that allows for estimation.

The Hive Worlds of the Imperium are classed as having upper limit population of 500 billion (3rd edition 40K rulebook, p. 114). The 5th edition rulebook on p. 115 estimates there to be 3.238 * 10^4 or 32,380 hive worlds in the Imperium. If all 1,000,000 worlds of the Imperium were hive worlds with 500 billion people that is 5 * 10^17. That is an UPPER limit for the Imperium's population because we know that not all worlds are maximum population hive worlds.

Minea from that page in the 5th edition rulebook is described as a typical example of a hive world, and it has 154 billion population, well under the 500 billion maximum. Assume we are still generous and give all hive worlds a population of 250 billion to account for less populated worlds elsewhere in the Imperium. 32,380 hive worlds of 250 billion population each is 8.095 * 10^15.

That is more than "500 trillion" for the hive worlds alone.

VampireDeLaVega wrote:Whats the population of all the factions within the Imperium? including civilians. Im guessing about 500 billion but i also got a feeling thats not even close to the actual amount.

500 billion?

Planet Minea in Ultima Segmentum alone have 154,000,000,000 people. ( Warhammer 40,000 5th Edition Rulebook ).
Ichar IV have 500,000,000,000 people ( Codex: Tyranids 3rd Edition ).
Billions of people can live on one Hive World ( population can vary from 25 to 500 billion as listed above ), and there are approximately 32,380 Hive Worlds in the Imperium. (Warhammer 40,000 5th Edition Rulebook ).
Those are only Hive Worlds, where are other ~967.620 planets? There are also Humans allied with Chaos, lost Human colonies, Humans living with xenos etc...
Humanity is outnumbered only by Orks and Tyranids ( probably ), rest is advanced math...

Actually we do have some data that allows for estimation.

The Hive Worlds of the Imperium are classed as having upper limit population of 500 billion (3rd edition 40K rulebook, p. 114). The 5th edition rulebook on p. 115 estimates there to be 3.238 * 10^4 or 32,380 hive worlds in the Imperium. If all 1,000,000 worlds of the Imperium were hive worlds with 500 billion people that is 5 * 10^17. That is an UPPER limit for the Imperium's population because we know that not all worlds are maximum population hive worlds.

Minea from that page in the 5th edition rulebook is described as a typical example of a hive world, and it has 154 billion population, well under the 500 billion maximum. Assume we are still generous and give all hive worlds a population of 250 billion to account for less populated worlds elsewhere in the Imperium. 32,380 hive worlds of 250 billion population each is 8.095 * 10^15.

That is more than "500 trillion" for the hive worlds alone.

Excellent piece of work.

Is the 5x10^17 equal to 50 million billion or 50 peta?

Ratius wrote:
Is the 5x10^17 equal to 50 million billion or 50 peta?

The right answer is: The number of Humans in the Imperium is to damn high!!!

I recall a guy in another thread yonks ago trying to calculate the population of Commoragh. It came out with a truely staggering number, like mind boggling. It was a bit OTT since his hypothesis was based on a descriptive analogy but interesting nevertheless.

Logical when the city is size of solar system...

The census will come back with 'more than enough', and thats all the answer they need

Ultimited manpower is the Imperiums greatest asset, that coupled with the proliferation of the STC. With those two resources they can bullrush through any obstacle and match even a waargh or the nids in a battle of attrition.

A census would be entirely possible and in fact the Imperium would be pretty irresposable not to. How are you going to know how many divisons to demand from a planet if you don't know its population?
GW are, for once, too sensible to give an actual number.

All that really matters is the 1k souls a day, to keep the emperor alive, so with at least 500trillion think hes got an unlimited lifespan. If he were a person and the number of humans was a bank acount he could live off the interest per day and live for eternity lol.

I believe 'untold billions' is the number given in the rulebook.

Durza wrote:I believe 'untold billions' is the number given in the rulebook.

I think that is one of those lines that is more poetic than factual. You don't want to take every line thrown out as 100% fact. It is like "there is only war". Well, there is farming too. And planets that haven't seen war in generations.

We know just between a dozen hive worlds the numbers have to be in the trillions, making the quadrillion estimates seem fairly likely.

I did some idle calculations once. Assuming that a significant fraction but not all of the Imperium was actively engaged in a war effort, that the Imperial rate of militarization was approximately equal to ours, and that the Earth's population sufficed as a close-enough average for the population of one million Imperial worlds, I tried to calculate a rough estimate of the size of the Imperial Guard. I took the number of soldiers under arms at the close of WW2 in 1945 with the number under arms in 1990, a year in which there were no major wars. I then figured the numbers for the 1945 number, the 1990 number, and the average of the two.

The three numbers I came up with were low trillions, low hundreds of trillions, and low quadrillions. That's the IMPERIAL GUARD, not the population of the Imperium. The population of the Imperium should be about a hundred times greater. So I would say that 500 trillion is probably a lowball estimate.

Joey wrote:A census would be entirely possible and in fact the Imperium would be pretty irresposable not to. How are you going to know how many divisons to demand from a planet if you don't know its population?
GW are, for once, too sensible to give an actual number.

No, a Census is impossable.


Assume they actually attempt to do this.

There are a number of problems.

1) the population of Hive Planets, particularly the underhive, are not kept complete track of. There will be millions of people living in the dark completely off the radar.

2) The birthrate and deathrate are incredibly high, which means that even if they had a meter keeping track it would be moving way too fast to get a fix on at a particular point.

3) Assuming they actually did get all this information, it would take decades or even centuries for it to get to Terra and get added up. A Census needs to be relatively instantanious to be of any use.


Because of this it is practically imposssable to get any sort of reliable information as to specific populations. Planets at best can estimate their population, and estimates added together won't give you anything reliable.

The only thing the Imperium could possably keep track of is the number of Guardsmen.

Joey wrote:A census would be entirely possible and in fact the Imperium would be pretty irresposable not to. How are you going to know how many divisons to demand from a planet if you don't know its population?
GW are, for once, too sensible to give an actual number.

A census would be possible for a single non-hive planet, but by the time it reached wherever they're collecting the figures it would be long out of date.

Ignoring the fact that the Imperium doesn't even know how many planets it has, that entire systems are occasionally forgotten about in the paperwork.

Again, Joey, you seem to be thinking of the Imperium as a single centralized organization. There might be some general census information in a subsector, or even sector, capital. That sort of information wouldn't make it into a central bureaucracy except in the most general terms.

up, they are just able to say with confidance that they have around 1 million worlds, and that number is constantly being added to and subtracted from.