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 14 Feb 2026: Pakistan 141.2 µg/m³, Kyrgyzstan 140.3 µg/m³ and Kazakhstan 78.3 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan11 cities141.2
- 2Kyrgyzstan3 cities140.3
- 3Kazakhstan4 cities78.3
- 4Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities63.9
- 5India169 cities55.7
- 6North Macedonia13 cities37.5
- 7Ghana4 cities37.1
- 8Poland58 cities35.4
- 9Thailand79 cities32.9
- 10Montenegro5 cities31.3
- 11Hungary13 cities26.9
- 12Romania29 cities26.7
- 13Laos3 cities25.6
- 14South Korea140 cities24.3
- 15Hong Kong13 cities23.7
- 16Bulgaria7 cities22.9
- 17Latvia4 cities22.6
- 18The Netherlands37 cities20.8
- 19Germany256 cities20.6
- 20Philippines3 cities19.8
+ 27 more countries, the next at 19.4 µg/m³
- 37United States879 cities8.0
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Malawi since 13 Feb 2026, Senegal since 17 Jan 2026, Slovakia since 9 Jan 2026 and Czechia since 7 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, Turkey and Iran, which publish only on their own websites. We are building the reader for China's network. The networks of Turkey and Iran don't answer requests from outside their countries, so we can't read them. Most cities there are missing from this board, not clean. Why.