World population
Humanity passed 8 billion in March 2022. Growth is slowing, and the UN medium projection has world population levelling off across the 2080s rather than turning in any one year. Here is the global picture for the rest of the century.
How has world population changed, and where is it heading?
1950–2100, medium variant
The world adds about 68,866,155 people a year: roughly 132,503,469 births against 63,637,314 deaths in 2026. That sounds enormous, but the growth rate has been falling for decades: it took just 12 years to go from 7 to 8 billion, while the step from 8 to 9 billion is projected to take until 2037. On the UN’s medium projection, growth keeps slowing until world population flattens out at about 10.29 billion, staying within 0.1% of that maximum from 2080 to 2088, then beginning a slow decline toward 10.19 billion by 2100. The single highest year in the series is 2084, but the years either side of it differ by so little that the peak is better read as a plateau than a date.
Behind the single global number, the story splits sharply by region: most of the remaining growth this century is projected to come from Africa and parts of Asia, while Europe and East Asia are already shrinking. Fertility is below the replacement level of roughly 2.1 births per woman in most of the world, so the long tail of growth comes from demographic momentum, from longer lives, and from today’s young populations having children of their own. Explore the milestone pages below for when each threshold is crossed, or compare regions on the continents page. Figures are the UN’s medium-variant projection, not a census.
Milestone pages
Country stories behind the curve
live clocks and full 1950–2100 profiles
The single global number is the sum of very different national stories: fast growth in Pakistan and Egypt, a plateau taking shape in Turkey and Kazakhstan, and slow decline settling in across much of Europe, from Poland to the Netherlands and Switzerland. Each country page has its own live clock, charts and context.
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