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 16 Feb 2026: Kyrgyzstan 138.1 µg/m³, Pakistan 132.6 µg/m³ and Kazakhstan 84.0 µg/m³.
- 1Kyrgyzstan3 cities138.1
- 2Pakistan11 cities132.6
- 3Kazakhstan4 cities84.0
- 4Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities58.6
- 5India195 cities56.9
- 6North Macedonia13 cities37.0
- 7Ghana4 cities36.0
- 8Poland58 cities34.6
- 9Thailand79 cities32.6
- 10Montenegro5 cities28.6
- 11Laos3 cities26.7
- 12Romania29 cities25.6
- 13Hungary13 cities25.5
- 14South Korea140 cities22.9
- 15Latvia4 cities22.9
- 16Hong Kong13 cities22.7
- 17Bulgaria7 cities21.8
- 18The Netherlands37 cities20.9
- 19Germany256 cities20.1
- 20Austria42 cities18.7
+ 27 more countries, 18.5 µg/m³ and below
- 36United States880 cities8.3
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 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.