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 8 Feb 2026: Pakistan 118.7 µg/m³, Kyrgyzstan 84.3 µg/m³ and Kazakhstan 64.5 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan13 cities118.7
- 2Kyrgyzstan3 cities84.3
- 3Kazakhstan4 cities64.5
- 4Ghana3 cities39.4
- 5North Macedonia13 cities32.8
- 6Poland59 cities31.2
- 7Thailand77 cities27.7
- 8Laos3 cities27.6
- 9Montenegro5 cities25.8
- 10Bulgaria7 cities24.7
- 11South Korea140 cities23.8
- 12The Netherlands37 cities23.6
- 13Bosnia and Herzegovina6 cities22.7
- 14Hungary13 cities21.6
- 15Hong Kong13 cities21.3
- 16Romania29 cities20.4
- 17Germany256 cities20.1
- 18Latvia4 cities20.1
- 19Austria42 cities18.6
- 20Taiwan44 cities18.6
+ 28 more countries, 17.8 µg/m³ and below
- 34United States881 cities8.6
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: India since 8 Feb 2026, 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.