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 30 days to 12 Sep 2026: Malawi 49.6 µg/m³, Indonesia 38.2 µg/m³ and Pakistan 33.9 µg/m³.
- 1Malawi5 cities49.6
- 2Indonesia4 cities38.2
- 3Pakistan14 cities33.9
- 4Chile47 cities29.2
- 5Nepal3 cities25.0
- 6Lebanon3 cities24.2
- 7India219 cities22.3
- 8Ghana3 cities20.8
- 9South Africa38 cities20.5
- 10Montenegro4 cities19.1
- 11Mexico50 cities15.3
- 12North Macedonia15 cities14.0
- 13Brazil25 cities12.6
- 14Serbia7 cities11.7
- 15Kazakhstan5 cities11.3
- 16Hong Kong12 cities11.2
- 17Thailand76 cities10.8
- 18Italy12 cities10.4
- 19Spain21 cities, was 239.8
- 20South Korea122 cities9.4
+ 26 more countries, the next at 9.4 µg/m³
- 27United States877 cities7.2
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Greece since 8 Sep 2026, Iceland since 8 Sep 2026, Luxembourg since 8 Sep 2026 and 5 more countries.
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 reader for China's network. Turkey's network doesn't answer requests from outside the country, so we can't read it. Most cities there are missing from this board, not clean. Why.