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 14 Feb 2026: Pakistan 104.2 µg/m³, Kazakhstan 55.0 µg/m³ and India 52.6 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan12 cities104.2
- 2Kazakhstan4 cities55.0
- 3India233 cities52.6
- 4South Korea140 cities33.1
- 5Thailand80 cities30.9
- 6Ghana4 cities28.7
- 7Laos3 cities27.8
- 8North Macedonia12 cities26.9
- 9Romania29 cities26.3
- 10Poland59 cities24.3
- 11Bosnia and Herzegovina6 cities22.1
- 12Latvia4 cities21.6
- 13Mexico37 cities21.0
- 14Montenegro5 cities20.6
- 15Taiwan44 cities20.2
- 16Hong Kong13 cities19.7
- 17Bulgaria7 cities17.9
- 18Hungary13 cities17.9
- 19Chile39 cities16.9
- 20Peru6 cities16.5
+ 27 more countries, the next at 14.5 µg/m³
- 34United States866 cities8.0
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Spain since 11 Feb 2026, Kyrgyzstan since 9 Feb 2026, Czechia since 30 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, 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.