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 Mar 2026: Kyrgyzstan 94.6 µg/m³, Pakistan 67.3 µg/m³ and Kazakhstan 54.6 µg/m³.
- 1Kyrgyzstan3 cities94.6
- 2Pakistan12 cities67.3
- 3Kazakhstan4 cities54.6
- 4India226 cities, was 23946.3
- 5Laos3 cities32.5
- 6Poland59 cities28.5
- 7Ghana4 cities27.1
- 8Latvia4 cities27.0
- 9Thailand84 cities27.0
- 10North Macedonia15 cities26.1
- 11South Korea141 cities25.7
- 12Montenegro5 cities24.5
- 13Bosnia and Herzegovina5 cities22.0
- 14Peru6 cities21.8
- 15Czechia4 cities21.7
- 16Mexico48 cities20.9
- 17Hong Kong13 cities19.5
- 18Hungary13 cities18.9
- 19Chile47 cities18.6
- 20Romania28 cities17.5
+ 29 more countries, 16.9 µg/m³ and below
- 42United States874 cities5.3
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Luxembourg since 11 Mar 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.