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 30 days to 12 Dec 2025: Pakistan 224.7 µg/m³, India 64.3 µg/m³ and Bosnia and Herzegovina 43.3 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan13 cities224.7
- 2India238 cities64.3
- 3Bosnia and Herzegovina5 cities43.3
- 4North Macedonia12 cities33.5
- 5Ghana4 cities25.7
- 6Thailand64 cities25.1
- 7Peru4 cities24.3
- 8Hong Kong13 cities23.5
- 9Montenegro5 cities23.2
- 10Mexico46 cities22.1
- 11Poland63 cities19.7
- 12South Korea138 cities19.5
- 13Chile45 cities16.8
- 14Slovenia12 cities16.6
- 15Hungary12 cities, was 416.5
- 16Philippines3 cities16.2
- 17Taiwan45 cities15.3
- 18Bulgaria7 cities15.1
- 19Slovakia8 cities13.2
- 20Austria38 cities11.9
+ 22 more countries, 11.5 µg/m³ and below
- 31United States797 cities7.3
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Martinique since 2 Dec 2025, Kosovo since 30 Nov 2025, Romania since 28 Nov 2025 and 6 more countries.
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.