up 5 million since the last census four years ago.
Adel Azar, the head of the Statistics Center of Iran, estimated the national population Sunday at 74.7 million. The last census, taken over three weeks in October and November 2006, counted just under 70 million people. The 1996 census found just over 60 million.
Azar said the population of Tehran is now 12.5 million.
Since the 1979 revolution 32 years ago, the national population has more than doubled while Tehran’s population has more than tripled—although one of the declared goals of the revolution was to invest more in rural areas so as to stop the flood of people to the capital.
The Mehr news agency also quoted Azar as saying that average monthly household income is the equivalent of $740 while monthly costs average $820.
Iran is commonly listed as the world’s 17th or 18th most populous country. There are uncertainties about precise populations, however. Iran is in a group with four similarly-sized countries: Egypt, Turkey, Thailand and Congo (Kinshasa). That group fits between Germany at 82 million and France at 65 million.
The practice of a decennial census was started by the United States in 1790. The point of that census, however, was not like a modern census that gathers a raft of statistics about income, housing and family size, but rather just to identify how many people lived where so the U.S. House of Representatives could be apportioned into districts representing equal numbers of people.