We can’t understand the world without understanding demographic change.

How many people are alive today? How many are born; how many die? What do we expect populations to look like in the future?

The United Nations updates its big dataset — the World Population Prospects — every two years to answer these questions. It just released its latest edition today.

We’ve updated all of our population-related datasets and charts with this new release. You can explore all the trends for every country in our Population and Demography Data Explorer.

In this article, we wanted to provide key insights from this latest wave of data.

The world population is projected to peak slightly earlier than in previous projections

The United Nations doesn’t only publish historical estimates of how population and demographic trends have changed in the past; it also makes projections for what the future might look like. To be clear, these are projections, not predictions of changes in the future.

In its 2022 publication, the UN estimated that, in its medium scenario, the global population would peak in 2086 at around 10.4 billion people.

This year’s edition brings this peak forward slightly to 2084, with the population topping at just under 10.3 billion.

The chart below compares the two revisions.

This isn’t the first time the projected peak has been pulled earlier. According to its 2019 edition, the global population would reach 10.9 billion by 2100 and keep growing. The 2022 revision was the first to project a peak in the 21st century.

Click to open interactive version

Not every country has seen a drop in projected population compared to the last edition. The chart below shows the differences between the two UN revisions, region by region. Note that the vertical axis scale for each region is different, allowing you to see the changes more clearly.

The latest UN revision has downgraded its future population estimates in Asia, Africa, and Latin America but increased its projections for Europe and North America.

Click to open interactive version

Falling fertility rates are driving this slowdown in population growth

Although the global population is expected to increase for many more decades, the population growth rate is slowing rapidly.

This is driven by a dramatic reduction in fertility rates, which measure the average number of children per woman. The global fertility rate has more than halved since the 1960s, from over 5 children per woman to 2.3.

This has happened at different rates worldwide, as you can see in the chart. Fertility rates in Europe, the Americas, and Asia are now below or close to 2 children per woman.

Across Africa, this figure is higher but has also fallen significantly. In the 1970s, it was almost 7 children per woman. Today, it’s almost 4. And the UN expects rates to keep dropping to less than 3 in 2050 and approaching 2 by the end of the century.

China’s population may have already peaked

In its 2022 revision, the UN projected that India would overtake China to become the world’s most populous country in 2023.

Its new estimates confirm this. You can see this crossover in the chart below.

The UN also expects that China’s population has peaked and is declining. This is because of a rapid drop in China’s fertility rates, which have been below the “replacement rate” — the average number of children per woman needed to keep the population constant from one generation to the next — for a long time.

Life expectancy is returning to pre-pandemic levels

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a large number of deaths.

The number of deaths in 2020 was around 5 million higher than in 2019. In 2021, there were an additional 10 million.

This led to a significant drop in life expectancy across the world. But, rates are now returning to pre-pandemic levels. You can see this rebound in the chart below.

Globally, life expectancy in 2022 roughly matched the rate in 2019. And it increased again in 2023.

Six million people fled Ukraine in 2022 and 2023

Millions of Ukrainians fled the country in 2022 as a result of the Russian invasion.

The UN estimates that net migration out of Ukraine was 5.7 million in 2022 and 300,000 in 2023, or around 6 million over these two years.

Many more have been displaced within Ukraine, but these internal migrants are not captured in international migration statistics.

This point also applies to more recent conflicts — such as those in Palestine and Sudan — where most displacement has been within the country rather than across country borders.

Read our key findings from the previous edition of the UN’s population data:

Five key findings from the 2022 UN Population Prospects

Explore the key highlights from the UN’s latest release of its world population estimates.

Hannah Ritchie and Lucas Rodés-Guirao (2024) - “Peak global population and other key findings from the 2024 UN World Population Prospects” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/un-population-2024-revision' [Online Resource]

@article{owid-un-population-2024-revision,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie and Lucas Rodés-Guirao},
    title = {Peak global population and other key findings from the 2024 UN World Population Prospects},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2024},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/un-population-2024-revision}
}

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