Landen naar bevolking 2026

Where the world's population lives

The 201 countries and territories with their own page on this site add up to roughly 8.3 billion people in 2026. Asia alone accounts for close to 59% of that total, and just two countries — India and China — make up more than a third of humanity between them. India, with about 1.48 billion people, has been the world's most populous country since overtaking China earlier this decade; China's population has already turned down from its peak. Africa is next at around 19% of the world total, but it is growing far faster than any other region: nine of the ten fastest-growing countries in the table below are African, led by Chad, Somalia and Niger, all adding more than a third to their population over the past ten years alone.

At the other end of the table, population size mostly tracks land area and history rather than anything unusual — the smallest entries are Pacific and Caribbean island states and territories such as Tonga, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Monaco, each under 110,000 people. Their small numbers make them statistically noisy on every ranking here: a single ferry-load of migration can move their growth rate by several percentage points, so they are best read as a rounding footnote rather than a trend.

Growth is no longer universal

Thirty of the 201 countries in this table shrank over the last ten years, a reversal that was rare a generation ago and is now concentrated in a specific place: Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Population decline used to be something that happened to a handful of unusual cases; it is now a normal outcome for roughly one country in seven. Meanwhile the population column and the median-age column (see our median age by country ranking) move in opposite directions almost everywhere — the countries adding the most people tend to be young, and the countries losing people tend to be old, which is mechanically why a shrinking population and an ageing one are usually the same story told from two angles.

What this ranking doesn't show

This table uses the United Nations' medium-variant projection, which assumes fertility, mortality and migration continue on their current trends — it is a central estimate, not a certainty, and gets less reliable the further out you look (see the 2050 and 2100 rankings for how much these numbers can move over a longer horizon). It also ranks by absolute headcount, which rewards large countries regardless of density or resources: a country with ten times the population but a hundred times the land area is a very different place to live than this table alone suggests.