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 Mar 2026: Kyrgyzstan 115.2 µg/m³, Pakistan 55.3 µg/m³ and Kazakhstan 45.2 µg/m³.
- 1Kyrgyzstan3 cities115.2
- 2Pakistan12 cities55.3
- 3Kazakhstan4 cities45.2
- 4India228 cities, was 23943.0
- 5South Korea141 cities29.3
- 6Thailand80 cities26.4
- 7Laos3 cities26.1
- 8North Macedonia14 cities25.2
- 9Montenegro5 cities24.5
- 10Ghana4 cities24.0
- 11Poland58 cities23.4
- 12Latvia4 cities22.8
- 13Peru5 cities22.7
- 14Mexico47 cities20.1
- 15Hungary12 cities19.2
- 16Chile47 cities18.6
- 17Serbia4 cities18.6
- 18Hong Kong13 cities18.1
- 19Czechia4 cities17.6
- 20Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities17.3
+ 28 more countries, the next at 17.0 µg/m³
- 43United States867 cities5.2
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, Turkey and Iran, which publish only on their own websites. We are building the reader for China's network. The networks of Turkey and Iran don't answer requests from outside their countries, so we can't read them. Most cities there are missing from this board, not clean. Why.