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How this site checks its figures
Every page here is assembled by a program from files published by the United Nations, the World Bank, UNHCR, NASA and others. What a person does is check them: that each file is the one it claims to be, that the arithmetic on top of it is right, and that the words beside a number say what the number really means.
What "checked" means here
It means four things, in this order. A figure is read from the file its producer published, never copied from another site. The arithmetic done to it is written down on the page that prints it. The page is rebuilt from scratch before it goes live, and the checks below must pass or there is no page. When something turns out to be wrong, it is fixed and then listed further down this page, alongside what it used to say.
Nobody here gathers data. Every number on the site belongs to the organisation that collected it, and every one of those organisations is named, with its licence, on References.
What runs before a page can be built
- 83 files, locked by their contents. Every source file is weighed against a hash recorded when it was last reviewed. A file that changed by one byte stops the build until a person looks at it.
- 97 structure checks. Each file must have the columns, the row count and the shape its source is known to have. The export this site was built from arrived with its filenames scrambled, so nothing is ever read by filename.
- 336 shape probes. Two files can carry the same columns and the same number of rows and still be different things: a population and a death rate look alike until you look at the values. The probes are what tell such twins apart.
- 73 canary values. Figures the producer published, recomputed from the file: the world in mid-2023 must come back as 8,091,734,930, Afghanistan's boys aged under one in 1950 as 157,787. If one is out, nothing is built.
Two more checks run once the pages exist. One decodes the numbers back out of the compressed files the pictures are drawn from and compares them with the words printed on the page, so a figure in a sentence and the same figure in a chart cannot drift apart. The other opens every page and looks for its own headline number, so a page that has quietly lost its figure fails the build instead of going live empty.
The stamp at the end of a page
Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries
It carries the date the site was last built and the number of published figures that build reproduced from the raw files. Hovering over it shows all four counts. It is not a seal of approval from anybody. It is a note of what the machine checked that day.
Rules this site keeps
- A projection never looks like history. Anything after the last year that was really counted is drawn with diagonal lines, on every picture, without exception.
- No projected figure appears without its range, wherever the source publishes one. The UN's range is the one it calls 95%: the band it expects the true figure to fall inside.
- Where scholars disagree, the disagreement is shown. The eight estimates of how many people were alive before anyone counted are drawn as eight lines. None is averaged into a single tidy answer.
- Counts and estimates are never drawn the same way. Seven million confirmed COVID deaths and 27 million estimated excess deaths are two different kinds of number, and they never share a chart form.
- Death counts sit still. Figures that tick upward while you watch are used for births and for the growing population. They are never used for the dead.
- No date of death, for anybody, anywhere. Your year describes the people born in the same year as you. It never describes you, and it will never tell you when you will die.
- What you type stays in your browser. A birth date, a country, a trip, a class size: all of it is worked out on your own device. The contact form is the one thing on this site that sends anything anywhere, and only when you press the button.
Corrections
If a number here looks wrong, it may well be. Write to Contact, choose "A number looks wrong", and say which page and which figure. Corrections are answered within a few days and fixed as soon as they are confirmed, which usually means the same day.
Everything that gets fixed is listed here, with what the page used to say. Each of these also gained a check of its own in the build, so the same mistake cannot come back unnoticed.
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It said: The carbon dioxide left over once every country had been counted was called "ships and planes".
It says now: That remainder also holds every country the World Bank has no figure for, Taiwan among them, so it is called "given to no country", and the five countries of a million people or more that are missing are named on the page.
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It said: The food section read each country's last year in the file, so countries the FAO stopped counting early were dropped, then listed as having no figure at all. North Korea, fifth lowest in the world at 1,981 calories a person a day, was one of them.
It says now: Each country takes its newest year from 2018 onwards and the page prints that year. The number of countries under 2,500 calories a person is 26, not 25, and they hold 784 million people.
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It said: The people who went home inside their own country in 2025 were called the most ever recorded.
It says now: UNHCR has published that count only since 1997, so the page says the most in the 29 years UNHCR has published it.
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It said: The page printed "100 of every 100" and drew a key for a group with nobody in it.
It says now: A topic that takes in everyone alive no longer draws an "everyone else" swatch.
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It said: Six of the counters on the home page showed a literal 0 to anyone reading without JavaScript, and to search engines, because the day they count begins at midnight.
It says now: Those tiles are built as a whole average day and labelled that way. The figure for today appears only once a browser can work it out.
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It said: Years that have already happened were written in the future tense, and a birth year as early as 1875 was accepted.
It says now: The words follow the year, and a birth year before 1900 is refused.
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It said: Every projected year showed the range of what the UN thinks could happen, except the last one. 2100 showed none.
It says now: 2100 carries its own range, like every year before it.
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It said: Several pages said a source was barred here because its licence forbids use on a site carrying advertising. This site carries no advertising, and some of those sources were drawn elsewhere on it.
It says now: Those pages say what actually bars a source: a licence forbidding changes, a question put to the producer and not yet answered, or terms that allow a picture but not a table.
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It said: Where a country's years in less than full health were fewer than the world's, its page explained that lives there are shorter. In China and 13 other countries, among them Vietnam, Malaysia and the Maldives, lives are longer than the world's average.
It says now: The explanation is given only where it is true. In those 14 countries the page says that their lives are longer than the world average.
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It said: Women were said to have more healthy years than men in 163 countries, and healthy years to have fallen by half a year or more since 2019 in 124. Both were counted on WHO's unrounded figures, so Iran and Sudan counted as "women have more" while their own pages print the same figure for both, and four countries whose pages show a fall of 0.5 were left out.
It says now: Both counts are taken from the figures the pages print: women have more healthy years in 161 countries, and healthy years fell by half a year or more in 128.
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It said: Some pages said the people aged 15 to 64 are "fewer each year" from 2020, or that those who finished upper secondary "keep growing" until a later year. In 24 countries, Canada and France among them, the projected count falls and then rises again, or dips on its way to that year.
It says now: The pages give only the year each count is largest, and that it is never as large again.
Nothing older is listed because nothing older has been found. The site was published in September 2026, and this list starts with its first readers.