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 5 Feb 2026: Pakistan 142.9 µg/m³, Kyrgyzstan 107.6 µg/m³ and Kazakhstan 92.2 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan11 cities142.9
- 2Kyrgyzstan3 cities107.6
- 3Kazakhstan4 cities92.2
- 4India199 cities56.6
- 5Ghana4 cities38.8
- 6Thailand78 cities32.0
- 7North Macedonia13 cities29.0
- 8Poland57 cities28.2
- 9Laos3 cities27.3
- 10South Korea140 cities26.2
- 11The Netherlands37 cities24.2
- 12Montenegro5 cities23.8
- 13Bosnia and Herzegovina6 cities23.3
- 14Austria42 cities21.9
- 15Hong Kong12 cities21.1
- 16Germany253 cities20.4
- 17Latvia4 cities19.6
- 18Romania29 cities19.5
- 19Bulgaria7 cities18.5
- 20Hungary13 cities18.4
+ 29 more countries, 18.4 µg/m³ and below
- 37United States878 cities8.3
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Czechia since 30 Jan 2026, Martinique since 30 Jan 2026 and Slovakia since 3 Jan 2026.
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.