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 5 Mar 2026: Pakistan 78.6 µg/m³, Kyrgyzstan 60.0 µg/m³ and India 44.2 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan14 cities78.6
- 2Kyrgyzstan3 cities60.0
- 3India243 cities, was 23944.2
- 4Kazakhstan4 cities43.4
- 5Montenegro4 cities40.5
- 6Laos3 cities40.0
- 7North Macedonia13 cities37.7
- 8Hungary13 cities30.8
- 9Romania28 cities29.9
- 10Bosnia and Herzegovina6 cities27.6
- 11Ghana3 cities27.6
- 12Poland56 cities25.9
- 13Thailand85 cities25.4
- 14Bulgaria7 cities22.4
- 15Slovenia12 cities20.5
- 16Mexico50 cities19.2
- 17Philippines3 cities18.6
- 18Latvia4 cities17.8
- 19Austria42 cities17.7
- 20Peru5 cities17.1
+ 27 more countries, 16.7 µg/m³ and below
- 37United States880 cities7.7
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Malawi since 27 Feb 2026, Czechia since 25 Feb 2026, Spain since 11 Feb 2026 and Martinique since 30 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.