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.

CountriesCities
The 30 days to21 Feb 2025 That day's board

The worst cities for PM2.5 over the 30 days to 21 Feb 2025: Dhaka 194.8 µg/m³, Lahore 172.3 µg/m³ and Kampala 117.8 µg/m³.

  1. 1DhakaBangladesh194.8
  2. 2LahorePakistan172.3
  3. 3KampalaUganda117.8
  4. 4DelhiIndia112.5
  5. 5KolkataIndia112.0
  6. 6N'DjamenaChad106.3
  7. 7Şabāḩ as SālimKuwait95.5
  8. 8KathmanduNepal91.6
  9. 9DushanbeTajikistan81.5
  10. 10MumbaiIndia79.9
  11. 11PeshawarPakistan79.4
  12. 12NegotinSerbia77.2
  13. 13Novi PazarSerbia76.9
  14. 14ValjevoSerbia73.2
  15. 15Banja LukaBosnia and Herzegovina72.2
  16. 16IslamabadPakistan70.1
  17. 17AlmatyKazakhstan70.1
  18. 18YangonMyanmar69.8
  19. 19Ulan BatorMongolia69.7
  20. 20KarachiPakistan66.8

+ 2,761 more cities, 66.0 µg/m³ and below

Not counted on this day, too few days measured: Kigali since 21 Feb 2025, Zagreb since 19 Jan 2025, Dubai since 18 Jan 2025 and Pristina since 13 Jan 2025.

30 days7 days
GoodModerateSensitive 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 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.