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 2 Feb 2026: Kyrgyzstan 122.6 µg/m³, Pakistan 122.5 µg/m³ and Kazakhstan 104.0 µg/m³.
- 1Kyrgyzstan3 cities122.6
- 2Pakistan11 cities122.5
- 3Kazakhstan4 cities104.0
- 4India236 cities55.5
- 5Ghana4 cities42.3
- 6Thailand77 cities36.1
- 7Laos3 cities29.2
- 8North Macedonia13 cities28.8
- 9Poland57 cities28.7
- 10Hong Kong12 cities25.2
- 11Montenegro5 cities25.2
- 12Austria42 cities20.5
- 13The Netherlands37 cities20.1
- 14Latvia4 cities18.5
- 15Mexico39 cities18.2
- 16South Korea140 cities18.1
- 17Germany252 cities17.9
- 18Hungary13 cities17.6
- 19Romania29 cities17.2
- 20Philippines3 cities17.1
+ 27 more countries, 16.9 µg/m³ and below
- 36United States872 cities7.5
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Czechia since 30 Jan 2026, Martinique since 30 Jan 2026, Bosnia and Herzegovina since 28 Jan 2026 and 2 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.