World population

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.