Where Do Your Czech Customers Live?

If you are active in a physical retail business in the Czech Republic or thinking about starting a new one, you will need to know a thing or two about Czech population distribution. Where do your customers live? Where is the biggest concentration? Do most people live in bigger cities or are evenly spread out in mid-sized ones? Which cities should you be present in? The following overview should give you high-level answers to those questions.

Basic Info - Czechia

Czechia (Czech Republic) is situated in the middle of Europe. It is neighboring Germany, Austria, Poland, and Slovakia.

Population: 10.6 million
Area: 78,866 km2
Density: 134 inhabitants per km2

Average population density 134 inhabitants per km2 is above EU average. Czechia is less densely inhabited than Germany and Great Britain but more than France and Spain. Neighboring Poland has a very similar density.

50% of The Population Live in Top 130 Cities

City Inhabitants # of Cities # % Population Popul. %
> 1,000,000 1 0.0% 1,280,508 12%
> 150,000 4 0.1% 2,120,663 20%
> 20,000 62 0.9% 4,517,904 43%
> 10,000 130 2.1% 5,476,304 52%
> 5,000 274 4.4% 6,460,567 61%
> 1,250 1,172 18.7% 8,470,963 80%
ALL 6,257 100% 10,578,757 100%

Pareto principle works and roughly 80% of the population lives in top 20% of cities.

50% of Czechs live in the top 130 cities with more than 10 000 inhabitants

Population Density By City

On the next map, you can see the same data in terms of population density. It is not surprising that the biggest cities are very densely populated, but you can also find some other medium-sized cities with a high-density population. Prague is the most densely populated city in Czechia (2.6k inhabitants per km2) followed by Havířov (2.3k) which is the 12th biggest city.

Moravia and North-South border with Germany are quite dense areas. On the other hand, South of the Czech Republic below Prague is populated relatively sparsely, except few big cities.

You can also clearly see, that top 4 biggest cities (Praha, Brno, Ostrava, Plzen) are surrounded by smaller satellite-cities.

Population density of the Czech Republic


Czech Statistical Office (2017). Population of municipalities of the Czech Republic (1.1.2017). https://www.czso.cz/csu/czso/population-of-municipalities-1-january-2017.

Geoportál ČÚZK (2017). INSPIRE harmonized dataset on Administrative Units. http://geoportal.cuzk.cz.


Hadley Wickham (2017). tidyverse: Easily Install and Load ‘Tidyverse’ Packages. R package version 1.1.1. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tidyverse.
