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 6 Mar 2026: Pakistan 80.6 µg/m³, Kyrgyzstan 64.7 µg/m³ and India 45.4 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan14 cities80.6
- 2Kyrgyzstan3 cities64.7
- 3India238 cities, was 23945.4
- 4Laos3 cities45.4
- 5Kazakhstan4 cities44.3
- 6Montenegro4 cities39.7
- 7North Macedonia14 cities36.9
- 8Hungary13 cities31.9
- 9Romania28 cities29.2
- 10Poland57 cities27.5
- 11Ghana3 cities27.1
- 12Bosnia and Herzegovina6 cities26.8
- 13Thailand85 cities26.0
- 14Bulgaria7 cities23.4
- 15Slovenia12 cities20.4
- 16Mexico49 cities19.6
- 17Austria42 cities18.1
- 18Senegal3 cities17.6
- 19Philippines3 cities17.5
- 20Chile41 cities17.2
+ 28 more countries, 17.2 µg/m³ and below
- 37United States880 cities7.5
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: 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.