Most Populous Countries in the World (2024 Data)

The world's 20 largest countries hold roughly 70% of all people on Earth, and the top of the list has changed this decade: India now leads, China is shrinking, and the United States sits a distant third. This ranking uses World Bank estimates for 2024, cross-checked against national statistics offices and the United Nations, to show who is biggest, who is still growing, and who is aging fastest. It also explains why different sources give different numbers for the same country.

Key Takeaways

• India has the largest population at about 1.45 billion in 2024, a few percent ahead of China at about 1.41 billion. The UN projected that India would overtake China in 2023.
• China's population has fallen every year since 2022. Mainland China's year-end 2025 total was 1,404.89 million, and births that year were 7.92 million, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
• Growth is now concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria's population grew about 2.1% in 2024 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo's about 3.2%, while Japan, China, and Russia shrank.
• The UN projects the world will peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s and then decline slightly to about 10.2 billion by 2100.
• Immigration, not births, was about 84% of United States population growth in the year to mid-2024, according to the Census Bureau.

The top 20 most populous countries in 2024

The table below ranks countries by total population in 2024, using the World Bank's World Development Indicators (data last updated October 8, 2026). Growth is the annual percentage change in 2024. Fertility is the total fertility rate for 2023, the most recent year available in the same dataset, meaning the average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime at current age-specific birth rates.

Rank	Country	Population (2024)	Annual growth (2024)	Fertility rate (2023)
1	India	1,450,935,791	+0.89%	1.98
2	China	1,408,975,000	-0.12%	1.00
3	United States	340,003,797	+0.96%	1.62
4	Indonesia	283,487,931	+0.81%	2.13
5	Pakistan	251,269,164	+1.51%	3.61
6	Nigeria	232,679,478	+2.08%	4.48
7	Brazil	211,998,573	+0.41%	1.62
8	Bangladesh	173,562,364	+1.21%	2.16
9	Russia	143,669,648	-0.11%	1.41
10	Ethiopia	132,059,767	+2.58%	3.99
11	Mexico	130,861,007	+0.86%	1.91
12	Japan	123,975,371	-0.44%	1.20
13	Egypt	116,538,258	+1.73%	2.75
14	Philippines	115,843,670	+0.83%	1.92
15	DR Congo	109,276,265	+3.24%	6.05
16	Vietnam	100,987,686	+0.63%	1.91
17	Iran	91,567,738	+1.05%	1.70
18	Turkey	85,518,661	+0.23%	1.51
19	Germany	83,516,593	+0.27%	1.39
20	Thailand	71,668,011	-0.05%	1.21

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, series SP.POP.TOTL (population), SP.POP.GROW (growth), and SP.DYN.TFRT.IN (fertility). The top-20 share of the world total is our own calculation from these figures against a 2024 world population of 8,140,897,523.

Three things stand out. First, the top two countries together hold about 35% of humanity: India about 17.8% and China about 17.3%. Second, Asia dominates the list: India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand, plus Iran and Turkey in West Asia. Four are in Africa (Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, and DR Congo). Third, the fertility column ranges from 1.00 in China to 6.05 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a six-fold spread inside one table.

A reminder on what the fertility number means. Demographers treat roughly 2.1 births per woman as "replacement level," the rate that keeps a population stable over generations in a country with low child mortality. The UN's 2022 population release notes that two-thirds of people live in countries where lifetime fertility is below 2.1.

Why other lists show different numbers

If you have seen a ranking where Ethiopia, Egypt, or Tanzania sits in a different spot, the cause is almost always one of four things.

1. Mid-year versus year-end. The World Bank and the UN report mid-year estimates. National statistics offices often report year-end totals. China's National Bureau of Statistics gives year-end figures for mainland China only (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan), so its 2024 number of 1,408.28 million is not directly comparable to the World Bank's 1,408.98 million.
2. Census versus model. Many countries have gone years without a census. India's most recent completed census counted 1,210,854,977 people in 2011, so its current population is a modeled estimate, not a head count.
3. Revisions. Each new UN World Population Prospects revision changes earlier estimates. A "2025 estimate" from 2022 data can differ by millions from one built on the 2024 revision.
4. Definitions of age and coverage. For example, the World Bank puts the share of China's population aged 65 and above at 14.7% in 2024, while the National Bureau of Statistics reports 15.6% at year-end 2024. Both are legitimate, from different methods and vintages.

Our advice: compare countries using one source and one year, as the table above does, and treat differences of a percent or two in rank-adjacent countries as noise.

India: how it became number one

For most of recorded history, China had the largest population. The UN's 2022 World Population Prospects projected that India would overtake China in 2023, a date that has been widely repeated since. The exact crossover moment is a modeled estimate rather than an observed event, because neither country counts its population continuously. What is not in doubt is the direction: in 2024, India's population was growing at about 0.89% a year while China's was shrinking.

India's fertility rate is around 2.0, and the country's own National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019 to 2021) put the national figure at 1.99 children per woman. That is slightly below replacement level, which means India's population is growing mostly because of demographic momentum. Momentum works like a supertanker: even after the engines are cut, the ship keeps moving, because a large cohort of people already born is still moving through their childbearing years.

One country, several demographies

India's averages hide large internal differences. In the NFHS-5 state table, 24 of the 30 states and union territories listed had a fertility rate below 2.0. The six at or above 2.0 were Uttar Pradesh (2.35), Bihar (2.98), Rajasthan (2.01), Jharkhand (2.26), Meghalaya (2.91), and Manipur (2.17). Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, had 199.8 million people at the 2011 census, about 16.5% of the national total then.

The practical result is a country where some regions already resemble aging societies while others remain young. Nationally, 24.6% of India's population was under 15 in 2024 and 7.1% was 65 or older, according to World Bank data. That profile gives India what economists call a demographic dividend window: a large share of working-age adults relative to dependents. The UN notes such a window can support faster per-capita economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America, but it is an opportunity, not a guarantee. Whether it pays off depends on whether education, health care, and jobs keep up.

Why population keeps growing after fertility falls

A common puzzle in the table above: India's fertility rate is slightly below replacement, yet its population grew by about 0.89% in 2024. The answer is the age structure. In India, 24.6% of people were under 15 in 2024, which means a large group of young people will pass through their childbearing years over the next two decades. Even if each woman has fewer than 2.1 children, a bigger group of mothers produces more births in total than the group before it.

The reverse also holds. China's fertility rate of about 1.0 would shrink the population steadily even without any deaths above normal, because each generation of parents is about half the size of the one that raised it. A population with low fertility and few young people has little momentum left to coast on. The same arithmetic explains why Nigeria, with 41.0% of its people under 15 and a fertility rate of 4.48, is on track for decades of growth even if fertility drops quickly.

Demographers call this lag population momentum, and it is why projections look so different from one country to the next. It also explains why the UN projects a global peak in the 2080s even though global fertility is already near replacement level: the world's large young cohorts need decades to age through the system.

China's demographic turning point

China's population fell in 2022, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, which described year-end 2022 as a decrease of 0.85 million from 2021. The Bureau's later communiqués show the decline continuing.

Year-end	Population (mainland)	Change vs. prior year	Births
2022	1,411.75 million	-0.85 million	9.56 million
2023	1,409.67 million	-2.08 million	9.02 million
2024	1,408.28 million	-1.39 million	9.54 million
2025	1,404.89 million	-3.39 million	7.92 million

Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China, annual statistical communiqués for 2022 to 2025.

The 2025 communiqué reports a crude birth rate of 5.63 per 1,000 people and a crude death rate of 8.04 per 1,000, giving a natural growth rate of -2.41 per 1,000. Think of a population as a bathtub: births are the tap, deaths are the drain, and migration is a small side pipe. In China, the drain has been running faster than the tap since 2022, and in 2025 the gap widened.

Aging at scale

China's age structure is changing quickly. The 2025 communiqué reports 323.38 million people aged 60 and above, or 23.0% of the population, and 223.65 million aged 65 and above, or 15.9%. A year earlier, those shares were 22.0% and 15.6%. That is a rise of about one percentage point in 60-plus share in a single year.

The UN's 2024 projections say China is expected to have the largest absolute population loss of any country between 2024 and 2054, at 204 million people, and a loss of 786 million through 2100, more than half of its current population. Those are projections under the UN's median scenario and are sensitive to fertility assumptions, so they are best read as a range of plausible outcomes rather than a forecast.

China has loosened its birth policies, moving from a one-child policy that ended in 2015 to a two-child policy adopted in 2016. Birth counts in the National Bureau of Statistics series have not recovered: 9.56 million in 2022 against 7.92 million in 2025. Whether any policy can reverse a long-run fertility decline is an open question, and the 2025 figure suggests it has not so far.

The United States: growth through migration

The United States ranks third at 340.0 million in 2024 and has 17.3% of its people under 15 and 17.9% aged 65 or older (World Bank, 2024), a profile close to Russia's and well short of Japan's. Its fertility rate of about 1.62 in 2023 is below replacement.

What keeps its population growing is migration. The Census Bureau reported that the U.S. population grew by nearly 1.0% between 2023 and 2024, the fastest annual rate since 2001. Of the 3.3 million increase, net international migration accounted for 2.8 million, or about 84%, while births exceeded deaths by nearly 519,000. In the words of Census Bureau demographer Kristie Wilder, "net international migration has become the primary driver of the nation's growth."

That figure comes with a caveat. Migration flows are volatile and respond quickly to policy, so a single year is a poor guide to the next decade. The UN observes that immigration is projected to be the main driver of growth in 52 countries through 2054, including Australia, Canada, and the United States. For a country-by-country view of migrants, see our ranking of countries with the most immigrants.

Asia's other large countries

Several of the largest countries after India and China are in South and Southeast Asia, and they are on very different paths.

Indonesia (283.5 million, +0.81%, fertility 2.13) is close to replacement-level fertility. Pakistan (251.3 million, +1.51%, fertility 3.61) has one of the youngest age structures among large countries, with 36.7% of the population under 15 and only 4.3% aged 65 or older. Bangladesh (173.6 million, +1.21%, fertility 2.16) has fertility near replacement level, at 2.16. Japan (about 124 million) is at the opposite end, as the next section explains.

Together, South Asia holds about 1.68 billion people in the World Bank's regional aggregates, compared with 2.39 billion in East Asia and the Pacific, 1.29 billion in sub-Saharan Africa, and 0.93 billion in Europe and Central Asia. South Asia's regional fertility rate of 2.00 in 2023 is just below replacement, while East Asia and the Pacific stand at 1.34.

Africa: where growth is concentrated

Sub-Saharan Africa had 1.29 billion people in 2024, about 16% of the world total, and a regional fertility rate of 4.33 births per woman against a world average of 2.20 (World Bank, 2023 fertility data). The UN's 2024 projections say the region will grow 79% to 2.2 billion by 2054 and could reach 3.3 billion by 2100, accounting for more than one-fifth of global growth.

Four African countries are in the top 20 today: Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nigeria (232.7 million) and DR Congo (109.3 million) have fertility rates of 4.48 and 6.05, respectively. The UN says nine countries are likely to double in size between 2024 and 2054, including Angola, DR Congo, and Niger, and that Nigeria and DR Congo could eventually surpass the United States in population. Tanzania, which at 68.6 million in 2024 sits just outside the top 20 on the World Bank's list, could enter the world's top ten by 2100.

Youth is a statistic, not a destiny

The age profile of these countries is striking. In 2024, 46.0% of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's population was under 15, 41.0% of Nigeria's, and 39.1% of Ethiopia's, compared with 11.4% in Japan. A young population is a large future workforce and consumer base, but it also means a large number of children and adolescents who need schools, vaccines, and eventually jobs. The UN's 2022 summary notes that more than half of projected population growth to 2050 would come from eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania.

What happens next depends on choices that demographers cannot forecast, including education for girls, access to contraception, child survival, and economic opportunity. Those same factors drove fertility down in Asia and Latin America over the past half century. To see where fertility is highest and lowest, our rankings of countries with the highest birth rates and countries with the lowest birth rates offer a more granular view.

The shrinking and aging countries

Among the 20 largest countries, four had falling populations in 2024 by World Bank estimates: China (-0.12%), Japan (-0.44%), Russia (-0.11%), and Thailand (-0.05%). Several more, such as Germany (+0.27%) and Turkey (+0.23%), were close to flat.

Country	Population aged 0-14	Population aged 65+	Fertility (2023)
Japan	11.4%	29.8%	1.20
Germany	13.9%	23.2%	1.39
United States	17.3%	17.9%	1.62
Russia	17.3%	17.2%	1.41
Thailand	14.7%	15.4%	1.21
China	16.0%	14.7%	1.00
India	24.6%	7.1%	1.98
Pakistan	36.7%	4.3%	3.61
Nigeria	41.0%	3.0%	4.48
DR Congo	46.0%	3.1%	6.05
World	n/a	10.2%	2.20

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (2024 age shares, 2023 fertility).

Japan is the clearest case. Its Statistics Bureau reported a population of about 123.8 million on October 1, 2024, down 550,000 (0.44%) from a year earlier and the fourteenth consecutive annual decline. People aged 65 and over were 29.3% of the total, about 36.2 million people, while those aged 15 to 64 were 59.6%.

South Korea is not in the top 20 by size (its 2024 population was 51.8 million), but it illustrates how low fertility can go. The World Bank's 2023 fertility rate for South Korea is 0.72, below even China's 1.00 in the table above. The UN's 2024 projections add that fertility is below replacement level in all European countries, and that Japan is expected to lose 21 million people and Russia 10 million between 2024 and 2054.

Two caveats. Fertility can rebound modestly in some places, and migration can change the picture in either direction. A shrinking population is not automatically a crisis, but it shifts the ratio of workers to retirees, which strains pension and health systems built for a younger age structure. For more on this, see our explainer on how demographics will reshape the global economy, and our rankings of the oldest populations and youngest populations.

What the UN projects for the world

The UN's World Population Prospects 2024 revision projects that global population will peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s and then fall slightly to about 10.2 billion by 2100. The UN also gives an 80% likelihood that the peak occurs this century, most likely between the mid-2060s and 2100, so the timing remains uncertain.

Some milestones and structural shifts, all from the UN:

• The world reached 8 billion people on November 15, 2022.
• Going from 7 to 8 billion took 12 years; going from 8 to 9 billion is expected to take about 15 years, until 2037.
• One in four people already lives in a country whose population has peaked.
• Global fertility was 2.3 births per woman in 2024 on the UN's figures, projected to fall to 2.1 by the late 2040s. (The World Bank's 2023 figure in the table above, 2.20, comes from a slightly different dataset and year.)
• Life expectancy was 73.3 years in 2024 and is projected to reach 77.4 years by 2054.
• By 2080, people aged 65 and over are expected to outnumber children under 18.

The older 2022 revision of the projections gave a peak of about 10.4 billion in the 2080s, slightly higher than the 2024 revision's 10.3 billion. This is a useful reminder that population projections are updated every two years and that earlier editions should not be quoted as if they were current.

What population size does and does not tell you

Size shapes domestic markets, labor supply, and political weight, but it is not the same as economic power. For a sense of how the biggest populations map to the biggest economies, see our ranking of largest economies by GDP, where several of the largest countries by population are not in the top ten economies, and several mid-sized countries are.

Think of a population as a stock of potential. Whether it turns into productivity depends on health, education, institutions, and capital. A country with a large young population and weak schooling has the numbers without the skills; a country with a smaller, older, highly trained workforce may produce more per person. Population also matters for different things in different contexts: a large domestic market supports industries that depend on scale, while environmental pressure depends more on consumption per person than on headcount. Life expectancy, for instance, varies widely across the countries in this ranking, as our list of countries with the highest life expectancy shows.

Common misreadings of population rankings

"The country with the biggest population will have the biggest economy." Not necessarily. Size sets a ceiling on the labor force and domestic market, but productivity per worker and institutions decide how much of that potential is realized.

"A falling population means a country is failing." Population decline can come from rising education and falling child mortality, which are usually good news. The difficulty is the transition: fewer workers supporting more retirees.

"Fast growth means fast development." The fastest growth rates in the table, such as 3.24% for DR Congo, come with some of the highest shares of children. That puts pressure on schools and health systems before it produces a larger workforce.

"India passed China on a specific day." The UN projected that the crossover would happen in 2023, but neither country measures population continuously. Any given date is an estimate built on models.

"All sources agree on the numbers." They do not, as the earlier section shows. Year-end and mid-year counts, mainland-only totals, and different UN revisions all produce legitimate differences.

The bottom line

The population map of the 2020s looks different from the one many people learned in school. India leads at about 1.45 billion, China has begun a decline that official statistics show deepening, and the United States holds third place largely through migration. Meanwhile, much of the future growth is in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain high and the population is young.

Demography moves slowly, which makes it unusually predictable over a decade and unusually uncertain over a century. The next two decades are largely written in the age structures that exist today. What happens after that depends on choices about education, health, migration, and policy that no projection can fix in advance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which country has the largest population in 2024? A: India, with about 1.45 billion people according to World Bank data for 2024, followed by China at about 1.41 billion and the United States at about 340 million. The UN projected that India would pass China in 2023.

Q: Is China's population really shrinking? A: Yes. China's National Bureau of Statistics reported year-end population declines in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. The mainland total was 1,404.89 million at the end of 2025, down 3.39 million from the year before, with 7.92 million births and 11.31 million deaths.

Q: What is replacement-level fertility? A: It is the number of births per woman, roughly 2.1, that keeps a population stable over generations when child mortality is low. The UN notes that two-thirds of the world's people live in countries with fertility below that level.

Q: When will world population peak? A: The UN's 2024 revision projects a peak of about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, followed by a slight decline to about 10.2 billion by 2100. It gives an 80% likelihood that the peak occurs this century, between the mid-2060s and 2100.

Q: Which countries are growing fastest? A: Among the 20 largest, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (+3.24%), Ethiopia (+2.58%), and Nigeria (+2.08%) had the highest growth rates in 2024. The UN says sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow 79% to 2.2 billion by 2054.

Q: Why does the United States keep growing when its fertility rate is below replacement? A: Migration. The Census Bureau reported that net international migration was 2.8 million of a 3.3 million increase between 2023 and 2024, about 84%, while births exceeded deaths by nearly 519,000.

Q: Why do different websites show different population rankings? A: They use different years, mid-year versus year-end counts, mainland-only versus broader coverage, and different revisions of UN estimates. Compare countries within a single source and year.

Sources

• World Bank, World Development Indicators: population, total (SP.POP.TOTL), population growth (SP.POP.GROW), fertility rate (SP.DYN.TFRT.IN), age structure (SP.POP.65UP.TO.ZS, SP.POP.0014.TO.ZS). Data last updated October 8, 2026. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL
• United Nations, Global Issues: Population (World Population Prospects 2024 findings). https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population
• United Nations DESA, "World population to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022" (World Population Prospects 2022). https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-reach-8-billion-15-november-2022
• National Bureau of Statistics of China, Statistical Communiqué for 2025. http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202602/t20260228_1962661.html
• National Bureau of Statistics of China, Statistical Communiqué for 2024. http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202502/t20250228_1958822.html
• National Bureau of Statistics of China, Statistical Communiqué for 2023. https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202402/t20240228_1947918.html
• National Bureau of Statistics of China, Statistical Communiqué for 2022. http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202302/t20230227_1918979.html
• U.S. Census Bureau, population estimates press release on international migration (2024). https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/population-estimates-international-migration.html
• Statistics Bureau of Japan, Current Population Estimates as of October 1, 2024. https://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/jinsui/2024np/index.html
• Demographics of India (summary of Census of India 2011 and NFHS-5 data). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

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