SmogRank / History / Country race
Countries, worst air first, day by day
Each country's typical measured city over the 30 days to every day since January 2023, worst first. Press Play to watch the order change, or drag the slider to any day.
The worst countries for PM2.5 over the 7 days to 16 Aug 2025: Pakistan 44.0 µg/m³, Chile 34.1 µg/m³ and Peru 25.2 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan11 cities44.0
- 2Chile48 cities34.1
- 3Peru4 cities25.2
- 4India226 cities20.8
- 5Philippines3 cities19.8
- 6Italy28 cities18.8
- 7Ghana4 cities17.6
- 8Switzerland11 cities16.8
- 9Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities16.1
- 10Spain111 cities15.6
- 11Malta5 cities15.4
- 12Czechia34 cities15.1
- 13Slovakia41 cities15.0
- 14Slovenia12 cities13.9
- 15Mexico38 cities13.8
- 16Germany235 cities12.7
- 17Luxembourg3 cities12.7
- 18France102 cities, was 10412.4
- 19Austria36 cities12.3
- 20Belgium50 cities11.8
+ 26 more countries, 11.6 µg/m³ and below
- 35United States859 cities7.6
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: China since 7 Aug 2025, Serbia since 3 Jul 2025, Thailand since 3 Jul 2025 and Taiwan since 3 Jul 2025.
Countries counted each day
A country's number is its typical measured city: the median of its cities' means over the 30 days (a city needs 21 of them measured; 5 of 7 on the 7-day race), shown only with 3 such cities. A country whose monitors go quiet fades out where it stood rather than sliding down, so a gap never reads as cleaner air; "was" beside a city count marks a month after many cities joined or left. 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.