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 30 days to19 Feb 2025 That day's board

The worst cities for PM2.5 over the 30 days to 19 Feb 2025: Dhaka 204.0 µg/m³, Lahore 170.8 µg/m³ and Kolkata 122.5 µg/m³.

  1. 1DhakaBangladesh204.0
  2. 2LahorePakistan170.8
  3. 3KolkataIndia122.5
  4. 4DelhiIndia116.5
  5. 5KampalaUganda114.7
  6. 6N'DjamenaChad106.6
  7. 7Şabāḩ as SālimKuwait94.6
  8. 8KathmanduNepal91.1
  9. 9MumbaiIndia84.3
  10. 10DushanbeTajikistan83.2
  11. 11Novi PazarSerbia82.4
  12. 12PeshawarPakistan81.0
  13. 13NegotinSerbia80.4
  14. 14Banja LukaBosnia and Herzegovina76.2
  15. 15Ulan BatorMongolia75.5
  16. 16ValjevoSerbia73.4
  17. 17IslamabadPakistan72.3
  18. 18AlmatyKazakhstan69.4
  19. 19YangonMyanmar69.3
  20. 20KarachiPakistan69.2

+ 2,813 more cities, the next at 66.6 µg/m³

Not counted on this day, too few days measured: Zagreb since 19 Jan 2025, Dubai since 18 Jan 2025 and Pristina since 13 Jan 2025.

GoodModerateUnhealthy for sensitive groupsUnhealthyVery unhealthyHazardousWHO 24-hour guideline, 15 µg/m³Fades where it stood: not counted that 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, Turkey and Iran, which publish only on their own websites. We are building the reader for China's network. The networks of Turkey and Iran don't answer requests from outside their countries, so we can't read them. Most cities there are missing from this board, not clean. Why.