Methodology
By Marko Visic · Updated 11 October 2026
Sources
| Data | Source | Used on |
|---|---|---|
| Population by age and sex, births, deaths, fertility, life expectancy and projections to 2100 | UN DESA Population Division, World Population Prospects 2024 (released 11 July 2024), medium variant; the projection page also shows the low and high variants and the prediction intervals. Read from the UN's data files and its wpp2024 R package (version 1.1-3). Licence: CC BY 3.0 IGO. | World and country pages, rankings, tools |
| US state population by age and sex | US Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 population estimates (1 July 2025) | /states, state pages, US states articles |
| Country surface area | UN Statistics Division, Demographic Yearbook 2024; for Argentina, Comoros and Sudan, FAO surface area via the World Bank (2023) | Area rankings, population density |
| Generation birth years | Pew Research Center (Silent Generation to Gen Z); McCrindle (Gen Alpha, Gen Beta) | Generation pages |
| Map boundaries | Natural Earth (public domain) | Maps |
| Flags | flag-icons 7.5.0 (MIT licence) | Country lists |
| Population milestones and people ever born | UN, The World at Six Billion (1999); UNFPA (2011); UN, Day of Eight Billion (2022); Population Reference Bureau (2022) | Population When You Were Born |
How figures are calculated
Dates. Population figures are for 1 July of each year. Up to 2023 they are UN estimates; from 2024 they are the UN's medium-variant projections, so 2026 figures are projections. For age groups from 2024 to 2030 we average the UN's end-of-year figures for two adjacent years, which reproduces the UN's published 1 July totals (world, 1 July 2026: 8,300,678,396).
World totals are the UN world total. It includes about 41 million people in territories without a page here, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Puerto Rico, so it is larger than the sum of the 195 countries.
Shares and ranks. A country's share of the world is its population divided by the UN world total. Rankings cover 194 countries; Vatican City has its own page but is not ranked.
Median age is the UN's published median age.
Growth rate is the change in the 1 July population from one year to the next. Doubling time = ln 2 ÷ ln(1 + growth rate).
Dependency ratio is the number of people aged 0–14 and 65 and over for every 100 people aged 15–64.
Pyramid types. Expansive: 30% or more of people are under 15. Constrictive: under 20% are under 15 and the 0–4 group is at most 85% the size of the largest five-year group aged 15–49. Stationary: all others.
Demographic transition stages. Stage 5 if deaths outnumber births; otherwise Stage 4 if women have fewer than 2.1 children on average; otherwise Stage 2 if there are 30 or more births per 1,000 people; otherwise Stage 3. The rule has no Stage 1, because no country today has the very high birth and death rates of that stage. Vatican City is not classified.
US states. State figures are the Census Bureau's 1 July 2025 estimates. DC is shown but not ranked among the states.
Rounding. Figures are rounded for display. Where a page shows the difference between two rounded figures, it is calculated from the figures shown.
Updates
The UN updates World Population Prospects every two to three years. Its next revision, originally planned for 2026, has been postponed to 11 July 2027. We update the site after each new release.
Togo: on 19 January 2026 the UN released an interim update of World Population Prospects 2024 that corrects Togo's population; Togo's 2022 census counted 8.2 million people, against 9.1 million in the July 2024 figures. Togo's page still shows the July 2024 figures until we apply the update.
Changes and corrections
- 10 October 2026 — Dependency-ratio and growth-rate pages moved to 2026 data. World figures on these pages and on Population When You Were Born now use the UN world total instead of a sum of countries. Percentage differences on country comparison pages corrected.
- 7 October 2026 — Retired 23 older blog posts whose figures we could not support, with redirects to the closest current page. The youngest- and oldest-states articles were rebuilt on Census Bureau data.
- 7 October 2026 — Demographic transition articles rebuilt. Stage lists are now calculated from 2026 UN data; earlier versions gave wrong country examples and a wrong history of the model.
- 6 October 2026 — US state pages moved to the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates. Earlier versions showed July 2023 figures labelled 2024, used one state's area to compute every state's density, understated the share aged 65 and over and cited the UN for state data.
- 26 September 2026 — Country pages moved to 1 July 2026 figures. Micronesia now shows the Federated States of Micronesia rather than the UN region of the same name.
Reuse and licences
You may reuse charts from this site, including Pyramid Maker downloads, with this credit: 'Source: populationpyramids.org, data from {the source named on the page}'. The text and charts are © Moving Data Systems d.o.o. The UN data are © United Nations and licensed under CC BY 3.0 IGO; US Census Bureau data are free to use.
Report an error
Email info@populationpyramids.org with the page and the figure. We check it against the source and correct confirmed errors.