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 16 Feb 2026: Pakistan 103.1 µg/m³, Kazakhstan 70.6 µg/m³ and Kyrgyzstan 68.0 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan12 cities103.1
- 2Kazakhstan4 cities70.6
- 3Kyrgyzstan3 cities68.0
- 4India233 cities52.0
- 5South Korea140 cities36.8
- 6Thailand81 cities33.0
- 7Laos3 cities32.3
- 8Ghana4 cities27.4
- 9Latvia4 cities26.8
- 10Romania29 cities25.2
- 11Mexico39 cities23.0
- 12Poland57 cities23.0
- 13North Macedonia11 cities22.7
- 14Senegal3 cities21.6
- 15Taiwan44 cities21.5
- 16Bosnia and Herzegovina6 cities19.0
- 17Montenegro5 cities18.6
- 18Hong Kong13 cities17.9
- 19Chile41 cities16.8
- 20Hungary13 cities16.7
+ 28 more countries, 16.1 µg/m³ and below
- 33United States870 cities8.1
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Spain since 11 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.