The Fastest-Growing Countries in the World

By the populationclock.org team · Published September 3, 2026 · All figures: UN World Population Prospects 2024, medium variant

The short answer

Rank every country by the percentage change in its population between 2024 and 2100 and the top of the table barely leaves one region. Angola grows by about 301%, from 37.3 million to 149 million. DR Congo is close behind at 299%, and Tanzania at 287%. Of the fifty fastest-growing entries in the dataset, 37 are African, and 18 of the top twenty are. The first non-African entry appears at number 13: Afghanistan. The full sortable table is on our fastest-growing countries ranking.

One caveat belongs at the top. The raw leader of the percentage table is Mayotte, which grows by about 326% but holds only 321,252 people in 2024. Percentage growth flatters very small places, and the unfiltered list mixes territories and micro-states in among countries of a hundred million. Everything below uses a floor of ten million people in 2024 when it names a leader.

The list is short because most of the world is not growing

Of the 237 countries and territories in the dataset, 127 are larger in 2100 than in 2024 and 110 are smaller. Only 53 at least double. That is the context the word fastest hides: growth is no longer the default state, it is a minority condition, and the mirror image of this article is our ranking of shrinking countries.

The arithmetic gets stranger the closer you look. The fifty fastest-growing entries add about 2.36 billion people between 2024 and 2100. The world as a whole adds about 2.06 billion over the same stretch. Fifty places out of 237 therefore account for more than the entire net gain of the planet, because everywhere else nets out to a subtraction. World population still rises for decades, but by the end of the century it is being carried by a small and shrinking group of countries.

Percentage growth and people added are two different lists

Ranking by percentage rewards countries that start small. Ranking by people added rewards countries that start large and keep going. By sheer numbers the biggest additions between 2024 and 2100 come from DR Congo, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania. DR Congo alone is projected to add about 322 million people, more than any other country.

Pakistan is the interesting entry there. It adds roughly 261 million, second most in the world, on percentage growth of about 105%, which ranks it only 52nd on that measure and leaves it off the fifty-strong list entirely. A large base converts a modest rate into an enormous number of people. If you care about food, housing or electricity demand, the people-added list is the one that matters. If you care about how much a society has to change, the percentage list is closer to the point.

Here are both lists, computed from the same dataset over the same period, 2024 to 2100, on the medium variant. Only DR Congo, Tanzania and Angola appear in both top tens.

Both columns cover every country and territory in the dataset, not a pre-cut shortlist, and both use the same scenario and the same endpoints. The divergence is arithmetic, not a difference of source: a percentage is measured against a country’s own starting size, so a small country doubling outranks a large one adding fifty million. Neither ranking is more correct; they answer different questions. You can download the underlying series for any country from its own page, or see the live ordering on the fastest-growing ranking.

Fastest right now is a third list

Everything above measures the whole run to 2100. Growth as it stands this year gives different names. In 2026 the quickest-growing countries above five million people are Central African Republic at about 3.3%, Somalia at about 3.2%, Niger at about 3.1% and DR Congo at about 3.1% a year. The world as a whole is growing at roughly 0.83% a year, down from a peak of about 2.3% in 1963. So the leaders are running at something like 4 times the global pace. 44 countries and territories are still adding more than 2% a year, while 65 are already losing people, which is the split we look at in World population by continent.

A growth rate of 3% a year sounds abstract until you compound it. Angola is projected to pass twice its current size around 2054, within the working life of someone starting a job today. Doubling is not a distant abstraction in these countries. It is a schools and housing problem with a date on it.

Two different engines produce the same headline

Almost all of the fast growers are on the list for the same reason: high fertility and a young population, which is a combination that keeps producing growth for decades even after the birth rate starts falling. DR Congo has a fertility rate of about 6.0 births per woman and a median age near 16, meaning most of its future parents have already been born. You can follow the detail on our DR Congo population page and Angola population page.

A handful of entries get onto the list by the other route. The United Arab Emirates is projected to grow by about 140% to 2100 despite a fertility rate of roughly 1.2 births per woman, far below the replacement level. It got there by importing people: between 1950 and 2024 net migration added about 8.1 million to its population against natural increase of roughly 2.7 million. What the projection does is let that imported population, which is young, grow on its own. Its trajectory is on our United Arab Emirates page.

What fast growth does to the size rankings

Growth rates are easy to skim past. Rank changes are not. DR Congo is the 15th largest country in the world today at about 115 million people, and on this projection it finishes the century 5th at roughly 429 million. It passes Japan around 2028, a crossing we track on the DR Congo overtakes Japan page. Tanzania moves from 21st to 9th over the same period.

These are not close-run swaps. They are the consequence of one group of countries tripling while another contracts hard over the same stretch: at the other end of the table, Ukraine is projected to fall by about 59%. The size ranking of 2100 is not a rearrangement of today’s so much as a different table.

The fast growers are slowing too

Nothing on this list is projected to keep growing at its current rate. Angola is modelled at about 5.0 births per woman today and roughly 2.1 by 2100. Tanzania goes from about 4.5 to 2.3. The projection has fertility across the fast growers converging on something close to replacement level within the century. Their populations keep rising anyway, because a country with a median age in the teens has decades of growth already built into its age structure, long after the average family stops being large.

The fastest-growing list is often read as a runaway. It is not one; it is momentum working itself out. Every one of the top ten here is still rising in 2100, but only in the sense that the projection horizon stops there, and their birth rates by then look much like everyone else’s.

The list looked completely different a lifetime ago

Apply the same measure backwards, to 1950 through 2024, and the leaders among countries of at least a million people are United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan. The leader there grew by a factor of about 150, driven largely by people arriving rather than by births, and no country on the forward-looking list comes near that. It is a useful check on the temptation to read a projection as destiny: the fastest-growing countries of the last seventy years were not obvious in 1950.

What would change this

The ordering of the top of the list is more robust than the exact figures in it, because the countries there share a starting condition, a very young population, that is already observed rather than assumed. The magnitudes are another matter. They compound fertility assumptions across three generations that are not yet born, and small changes in the assumed pace of decline move the 2100 numbers a long way. Faster decline pulls the whole list down without much reshuffling it. Migration is the other soft spot, and for smaller countries it can outweigh births and deaths combined.

Figures here are the UN World Population Prospects 2024 medium variant, aggregated as described in our methodology. Projections are conditional statements about what follows from a set of assumptions rather than forecasts, and the century-end numbers on this page should be read as direction and scale rather than as detail.