The population of Bulgaria (2001 estimate) is 7,707,495. The 1985 census population was 8,948,649; the subsequent decrease was largely caused by emigration. Bulgaria has a population density of 69 persons per sq km (180 per sq mi). The population became increasingly urbanized after 1945, and today 70 percent of the people live in urban areas. About 85 percent of the population is classified as ethnic Bulgarian and about 9 percent is Turkish. Small groups of Armenians, Roma (Gypsies), Greeks, and Macedonian Slavs also inhabit the country.

Ethnically, the population is fairly homogeneous, Bulgarians making up about 85 percent of the total. The Slav tribes that settled in the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, thereby assimilating the local Thracian tribes, formed a basic ethnic group. The group known as the Bulgars, who formed the first Bulgarian state in 681, formed another component. With the gradual obliteration of fragmented Slav tribes, Bulgars and Slavs consolidated into a unified Slav people who thenceforward retained the name of Bulgarians. This national unity, present in embryonic form during the long Ottoman domination, flowered in the independence struggles of the 19th century.