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 15 Mar 2026: Kyrgyzstan 104.1 µg/m³, Pakistan 60.6 µg/m³ and Kazakhstan 48.6 µg/m³.
- 1Kyrgyzstan3 cities104.1
- 2Pakistan12 cities60.6
- 3Kazakhstan4 cities48.6
- 4India231 cities, was 23944.0
- 5Laos3 cities29.9
- 6South Korea141 cities28.1
- 7Thailand81 cities26.4
- 8Ghana4 cities25.9
- 9Latvia4 cities24.4
- 10Poland58 cities24.4
- 11North Macedonia14 cities24.2
- 12Montenegro5 cities23.5
- 13Peru5 cities23.2
- 14Bosnia and Herzegovina5 cities20.7
- 15Mexico48 cities20.2
- 16Hungary12 cities18.9
- 17Chile47 cities18.7
- 18Hong Kong13 cities18.7
- 19Czechia10 cities18.3
- 20Finland15 cities18.2
+ 28 more countries, 16.9 µg/m³ and below
- 42United States865 cities5.4
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Romania since 15 Mar 2026, 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.