SmogRank / History / City race
Cities, worst air first, day by day
Each measured city's average over the 30 days to every day since January 2023, worst first. Find your own city to follow it through the race, or keep to one country.
The worst cities for PM2.5 over the 30 days to 17 Jan 2025: Lahore 271.6 µg/m³, Delhi 203.5 µg/m³ and Dhaka 198.7 µg/m³.
- 1LahorePakistan271.6
- 2DelhiIndia203.5
- 3DhakaBangladesh198.7
- 4PeshawarPakistan177.8
- 5KolkataIndia164.5
- 6N'DjamenaChad144.4
- 7DushanbeTajikistan132.4
- 8KampalaUganda123.1
- 9IslamabadPakistan120.3
- 10Ulan BatorMongolia117.7
- 11MumbaiIndia95.8
- 12KathmanduNepal91.5
- 13NegotinSerbia86.6
- 14BaghdadIraq78.4
- 15Banja LukaBosnia and Herzegovina78.4
- 16HyderabadIndia72.0
- 17SalorUzbekistan71.6
- 18CairoEgypt66.6
- 19SarajevoBosnia and Herzegovina65.9
- 20AlmatyKazakhstan61.9
+ 2,626 more cities, 57.4 µg/m³ and below
Not counted on this day, too few days measured: Novi Pazar since 17 Jan 2025, Niš since 17 Jan 2025, Kragujevac since 17 Jan 2025 and 13 more cities.
Cities counted each day
A city's number is its average over the 30 days, shown only when 21 of them were measured (5 of 7 on the 7-day race), the same minimum as the 30- and 7-day boards. A city whose monitors go quiet fades out where it stood rather than sliding down, so a gap never reads as cleaner air. Some large countries are thin or missing because their monitors' licences don't allow reuse. How we rank.
Not covered: the government monitoring networks of China and Turkey, which publish only on their own websites; we are building the readers for them. Most cities there are missing from this board, not clean. Why.