How Many Americans Live in Bahrain
The largest American population in Bahrain appears in no Bahraini statistic: Fifth Fleet personnel and their families live entirely outside the civil registers. Everyone else is counted only as North American.
The American Emigration Revue counts US citizensPeople holding United States citizenship, as counted by Bahrain's own official records. A separate population from US-born residents; the two are never added. Definitions ›, US-born residentsPeople born in the United States living in Bahrain, whatever citizenship they hold today. A separate population from US citizens; the two are never added. Definitions ›, naturalizations and long-term permits from official government sources, with every figure cited. This page sets out what Bahrain publishes, what it does not, and how far the published record can be trusted.
Why Bahrain's Records, Not Washington's
The ContextThe context every page needs: who counts Americans abroad, and who doesn't.
The United States publishes no count of its own citizens abroad. Its best federal figure, 3.3 million Americans worldwide, is a statistical model built to size the overseas electorate, and the same model said 4.4 million two years earlier. The Census Bureau decided in 1976 to exclude private Americans abroad from the decennial enumeration (overseas federal employees and military are still counted). What Washington publishes instead is fragments: Social Security checks mailed to foreign addresses, tax returns claiming foreign income, quarterly lists of people who gave up their citizenship. See what each federal source actually counts ›
So this project counts from the receiving side. Every figure on this page comes from records Bahrain itself publishes, read under the same rules applied to every country in the project. Where Bahrain publishes, it is counted and cited. Where it does not, the gap is shown rather than filled: no estimates, no models. How openly each country reports ›
What the Research Found
The FindingsFindings from the Bahrain research, drawn from the official record.
- Bahrain hosts a longstanding U.S. national community, the largest component of which is the U.S. military presence anchored by NAVCENT and the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama. This population is structurally absent from Bahraini administrative datasets.
- Bahrain's resident foreign population was estimated at 849,707 in 2023 (iGA), constituting roughly half of the total population. Source-country breakdowns are not published; only Bahraini versus non-Bahraini.
- LMRA Expatriate Management System reports, the most granular Bahraini permit-data source, list the top 20 source-country nationalities of foreign workers and the top 10 for dependants. The United States does not appear in either listing across 2014 to 2025.
- The 2020 Census recorded 16,415 individuals in the "North American" nationality group, the only Bahraini publication providing any U.S.-related disaggregation.
- Data.gov.bh publishes inbound visitor counts including an "America" category (about 50,000 annually pre-pandemic). The scope of this category is not stated in the dataset metadata; verification is required to determine whether it denotes the United States specifically or a regional aggregate.
- Bahrain in Figures 2023 reports aggregate counts of mixed-nationality marriages where the husband is Bahraini and the wife is non-Bahraini (1,120 in 2019; 654 in 2020; 1,235 in 2021), without disaggregation by foreign-spouse country.
How Far to Trust These Figures
The Publishing RecordWhat Bahrain publishes, how often it publishes, and the sources behind every number on this page.
- Inflows
- Permits
- US-Born
- Citizens
- Naturalizations
The gaps: No US-disaggregated official publication identified for this country.
Reconstructing U.S. presence in Bahrain from Bahraini sources alone systematically understates by an order of magnitude (the 9,000-person military segment carries the population-size question). Any published population estimate must integrate U.S.-side sources such as US Embassy Manama estimates and NAVCENT personnel figures; these are external to Bahraini host-country data and do not satisfy the project's host-country-publication requirements, but they are essential for total-population reasoning.
Every figure on this page comes from one of the publishers below. Links go to the authority and, where stable, straight to the dataset.
Frequently Asked Questions
Quick AnswersEvery answer is drawn from the official record, from the same sources cited across this page.
Does Bahrain recognize dual citizenship with the United States?
Where do the figures for Americans in Bahrain come from?
News stories our newsroom has published about this country.
The full series, every year, every country
The public view shows a limited year window for each series. Researchers and journalists can request access to the complete annual record for every country in the project.