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 6 Feb 2026: Pakistan 130.2 µg/m³, Kyrgyzstan 104.6 µg/m³ and Kazakhstan 86.2 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan12 cities130.2
- 2Kyrgyzstan3 cities104.6
- 3Kazakhstan4 cities86.2
- 4India199 cities54.8
- 5Ghana4 cities37.0
- 6Thailand77 cities30.4
- 7North Macedonia13 cities29.8
- 8Poland56 cities28.2
- 9Laos3 cities27.4
- 10South Korea140 cities27.0
- 11Montenegro5 cities25.6
- 12The Netherlands37 cities24.4
- 13Bosnia and Herzegovina6 cities22.5
- 14Germany255 cities21.3
- 15Hong Kong12 cities21.3
- 16Latvia4 cities21.0
- 17Austria42 cities20.8
- 18Bulgaria7 cities20.5
- 19Hungary13 cities20.4
- 20Romania29 cities18.9
+ 29 more countries, 18.8 µg/m³ and below
- 37United States881 cities8.5
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.