As of 2026. The diaspora total is a cumulative estimate that continues to grow, and emigration rose again after the protest waves of 2022-23; no official Iranian figure exists.
After the 1979 revolution and through the war with Iraq, large numbers of Iranians left the country: former officials and officers, professionals, religious minorities including Jews, Armenians, Zoroastrians and Baha'is, and later students and political opponents. Political prisoners were executed in large numbers in the 1980s, culminating in the mass executions of 1988, which Amnesty International documented in its 2018 report Blood-Soaked Secrets and which UN special rapporteurs have repeatedly raised. The Baha'i community, Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority and unrecognised by the constitution, has been subject to a documented state policy: more than 200 Baha'is were executed in the 1980s, cemeteries and holy places were destroyed, and a 1991 memorandum approved at the highest level set out that Baha'is should be blocked from higher education and from influential employment. Iran rejects the characterisation, stating that those prosecuted were convicted of espionage or security offences and that Baha'ism is a political organisation rather than a religion. The exclusions have continued into the 2020s, with property confiscations in Baha'i villages reported by UN human-rights bodies.
The Islamic Republic's prosecutions, executions and exclusions drove large-scale emigration and stripped the Baha'i community of rights and property
Iran's census of 1976 counted 33,708,744 people, giving roughly 37 million by 1979. The Baha'i community, the largest non-Muslim religious minority and the one most systematically targeted, is estimated at about 300,000 then and now; it is not recognised in the Iranian census, so its size is estimated by the community and outside observers rather than counted.
The range covers political executions from 1979 onward. Amnesty International and human-rights organisations put the 1988 prison massacres alone at several thousand and the executions of 1981-85 at several thousand more; higher figures come from opposition organisations, principally the People's Mojahedin, and are not independently verified. Iran has never published figures.
Amnesty International's 2018 report and successive UN special rapporteurs on human rights in Iran documented executions, torture, disappearances and the destruction of Baha'i cemeteries and shrines.
Iran, United States of America, France