There are officially 358,540 people living in Zürich (as of 2007), making it Switzerland's largest city. Of registered inhabitants, 30.6% (115,379 people) do not hold Swiss citizenship. Of these, German citizens make up the largest group with 22.0%, followed by Italians. The population of the city proper including suburbs totals 1.08 million people. However, the entire metropolitan area (including the cities of Winterthur, Baden, Brugg, Schaffhausen, Frauenfeld, Uster/Wetzikon, Rapperswil-Jona and Zug) has a population of around 1.68 million people.

Languages
The official language used by the government and in most publications is German, while the main language is Zürich German (Züritüütsch), which is a dialect of Alemannic. As of 2000, speakers with Alemannic or German as their mother-tongue make up 77.7% of the population. Italian follows behind at 4.7% of the population. Other native languages spoken by more than 1% of the population include South Slavic languages (2.2%)-this includes Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian, Spanish (2.2%), French (2.1%), English (1.8%), Portuguese (1.6%), Albanian (1.5%).

Religion
Since the reformation led by Huldrych Zwingli, Zürich has remained the centre and stronghold of protestantism in Switzerland. In the course of the 20th century, this has changed as Catholics became larger than the reformed church in the city, with 33.3% in the year 2000. An increasing number of residents, about 16.8% of the population in 2000, declared themselves as being without religion. However since 2000, those declaring no religion or having a religion other than either mainstream Protestantism or Catholicism has grown rapidly. As per the end of 2009, this group declaring no religion or a religion other than mainstream Christianity is the largest within both the Canton of Zurich and the City of Zurich. For the city of Zurich, at the end of 2008, less than a third (112,000) were catholics, even fewer (97,000) were reformed and by far the largest group with 157,000 is those with none or another confession (like Muslims).

Social
The level of unemployment in Zürich was 2.6% in August 2007. About 4% of the city population, 15,500, live either directly or indirectly on welfare payment from the state (April 2005).