Ammon News - Jordan’s population surpassed 12 million on Thursday, according to the official population clock issued by the Department of Statistics (DoS), marking an increase of one million people in roughly four and a half years since the population reached 11 million on October 1, 2021.

The milestone comes as the government moves toward completing the 2026 Population and Housing Census, in line with the Statistics Law, which mandates a census every ten years.

The Director General of the Department of Statistics, Haider Freihat, said earlier this month that the number of households in Jordan is currently estimated at around 2.5 million, distributed across the Kingdom’s 12 governorates, noting that the statistical counting unit adopted by the department is the "statistical block," with Jordan divided into approximately 24,000 such blocks.

The department has completed the first phase of the census, known as the central update, followed by the packaging phase. It is currently implementing the third phase, the enumeration stage, which has reached about 15% completion and is expected to conclude by the end of June.

Freihat added that, for the first time in Jordan’s history, a "self-enumeration" option will be introduced. Around a quarter of the population has been selected to participate, allowing households to fill in their data independently through an electronic form accessed via a QR code, without the need for a field researcher to visit their homes.

He emphasized that the final census will provide comprehensive and up-to-date data on population size and distribution across governorates, population growth rates, migration trends, household size and characteristics, as well as statistics on persons with disabilities, among other key indicators needed by policymakers, researchers, and academic institutions.