How Many People Are in the World? Numbers Quiz
How many of us
Nobody counts every person on Earth on the same day. Countries hold censuses years apart, and the United Nations combines them with records of births and deaths to estimate the world's population. Its latest estimate is a little over 8 billion people.
The UN marked the 'Day of Eight Billion' on November 15, 2022. The date is symbolic: the real moment can't be known to the day, but the estimate is good to within a few percent. Each year roughly 130 million babies are born and about 60 million people die, so the world gains around 70 million people a year, more than two every second.
Where people live
People are spread very unevenly. About six in ten live in Asia, home to the two most populous countries: India, which passed China in 2023, and China itself. Each has more than 1.4 billion people, about as many as the whole of Africa.
Africa comes second, with about 1.5 billion people. Its most populous country is Nigeria, with well over 200 million, followed by Ethiopia, Egypt and DR Congo. Europe, the Americas and Oceania together hold only a little over a fifth of humanity.
Languages follow a different map. Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers, but English is the most widely spoken language overall: about 1.5 billion people use it, and most of them learned it as a second language.
How it changes
For most of history the world's population grew very slowly, because so many children died young. It first passed 1 billion around 1800. Then clean water, vaccines and more food from modern farming let far more people reach adulthood, and growth sped up: 2 billion around 1927, 4 billion in 1974, 8 billion in 2022.
Today growth is slowing almost everywhere, as families have fewer children. Africa is the exception: it has the youngest population of any continent and is growing fastest, while several countries in Europe and East Asia are already shrinking.
People also live much longer. Average life expectancy worldwide was about 32 years in 1900; today it is about 73. The UN expects the world population to peak at a little over 10 billion later this century.