Population density (people per sq. km of land area) by country

What this measures

Population density is midyear population divided by land area in square kilometers. Population is based on the de facto definition of population, which counts all residents regardless of legal status or citizenship--except for refugees not permanently settled in the country of asylum, who are generally considered part of the population of their country of origin. Land area is a country's total area, excluding area under inland water bodies, national claims to continental shelf, and exclusive economic zones. In most cases the definition of inland water bodies includes major rivers and lakes.

Limitations: Current population estimates for developing countries that lack recent census data and pre- and post-census estimates for countries with census data are provided by the United Nations Population Division and other agencies. The cohort component method - a standard method for estimating and projecting population - requires fertility, mortality, and net migration data, often collected from sample surveys, which can be small or limited in coverage. Population estimates are from demographic modeling and so are susceptible to biases and errors from shortcomings in the model and in the data.

Each country's latest available year is shown; countries report on different schedules, so compare years before comparing values.

Ranking

Regions and income groups

More environment indicators

• Fertilizer consumption (% of fertilizer production)
• Fertilizer consumption (kilograms per hectare of arable land)
• Agricultural land (sq. km)
• Agricultural land (% of land area)
• Arable land (hectares)
• Arable land (hectares per person)
• Arable land (% of land area)
• Land under cereal production (hectares)
• Permanent cropland (% of land area)
• Forest area (sq. km)
• Forest area (% of land area)
• Agricultural irrigated land (% of total agricultural land)

Reading data like this

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Source

World Bank, World Development Indicators, EN.POP.DNST, CC BY 4.0. Original source: FAO population estimates, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), publisher: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); World Bank population estimates, World Bank (WB), publisher: World Bank (WB) View on data.worldbank.org; the full definition is in the World Bank's metadata glossary.