Census in the Philippines
censuses of language, ethnic group, and country of citizenship in the Philippines
The Philippine census (Filipino: senso/sensus) is a regularly occurring and official inventory of the human population and housing units in the Philippines. Since 1970, the population has been enumerated every five years. Results from the censuses are used to allocate congressional seats and fund government programs.
The mid-year census is known as the Census of Population (POPCEN), while the decennial census is referred to as the Census of Population and Housing (CPH).
By virtue of Republic Act No. 10625, known as the Philippine Statistical Act of 2013, censuses in the Philippines have been administered by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) since the 2015 census.
History
The first census in the Philippines in 1591, was based on tributes collected and yielded about 666,712 people in the islands. In 1799, Friar Manuel Buzeta estimated the population count as 1,502,574. However, the first official census in the Philippines was carried out by the Spanish government pursuant to a royal decree calling for the counting of persons living as of the midnight of December 31, 1877. Based on this census, the Philippines had a population of 5,567,685 as of the reference date.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Census in the Philippines” as censuses of language, ethnic group, and country of citizenship in the Philippines. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5058978. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 2013, 2015 and 1591.
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This entry incorporates text from “Census in the Philippines” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.