About 33,000 of 35,000 Buru people live on the island of Buru; they make about a quarter of the island population (about 135,000 as of 2009) and are the most numerous ethnicity of Buru; about 2,000 live on Ambon Island and several hundred are scattered over other islands in the Indonesian province of Maluku and the capital Jakarta. There is a small Buru community in the Netherlands formed by the descendants of the soldiers of Republic of South Moluccas () who moved there after the accession of this self-proclaimed state in Indonesia in 1950.
