censuswall A story · South Korea by age, 1950 to 2100
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A story in pictures

A country turned upside down

South Korea by age, 1950 to 2100. Scroll: each picture changes with the words beside it.

Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries

menwomen

How to read this: each bar is five years of age, youngest at the bottom; men on the left, women on the right. A bar’s length is its share of everyone, so only the shape changes, not the size. The line is the middle age: half the people are older.

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1950: a pyramid

In 1950 South Korea was young. Line everyone up by age, and the person in the middle was 18.7. Women had 6.06 children each, on average, so every age group was bigger than the one above it: a pyramid.

South Korea →

menwomen1950

How to read this: each bar is five years of age, youngest at the bottom; men on the left, women on the right. A bar’s length is its share of everyone, so only the shape changes, not the size. The line is the middle age: half the people are older.

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1990: the base narrows

By 1990 women were having 1.60 children each, fewer than the two it takes for each generation to replace the one before. Those born in the 1960s and early 1970s, aged 15 to 29 by then, were the widest part of the shape. The faint outline is 1950.

South Korea →

menwomen1950

How to read this: each bar is five years of age, youngest at the bottom; men on the left, women on the right. A bar’s length is its share of everyone, so only the shape changes, not the size. The line is the middle age: half the people are older.

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2023: fewer than one child each

In 2023 women had 0.72 children each, and the person in the middle was 45.5. The number of people aged 15 to 64 was largest in 2017, at 37.6 million; the whole population in 2020, at 51.9 million.

South Korea →

menwomen1950projection

How to read this: each bar is five years of age, youngest at the bottom; men on the left, women on the right. A bar’s length is its share of everyone, so only the shape changes, not the size. The line is the middle age: half the people are older. Hatched bars are the UN’s projection.

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2050: standing on its point

On the UN's projection there are 45.1 million people in 2050, and the widest band is people aged 75–79. Hatched bands are projection. The UN gives a range for the total, not for each age, so this shape is its middle path.

South Korea →

menwomen1950projection

How to read this: each bar is five years of age, youngest at the bottom; men on the left, women on the right. A bar’s length is its share of everyone, so only the shape changes, not the size. The line is the middle age: half the people are older. Hatched bars are the UN’s projection.

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2100: upside down

By 2100, on the projection, the person in the middle is 60.8 and 45.2 of every 100 people are 65 or older. There are 21.8 million people, not far above the 19.8 million of 1950, in the opposite shape.

South Korea →

Sources and method

The stories are drawn when the site is built, from the same files as the pages they link to: the UN's population counts and projections, the UN's cities, the scholars' estimates before 1950, NASA's temperatures and NOAA's air. Projections are hatched; where the UN gives a range for the whole population, it is drawn. The UN gives no range for each age, or for cities and the countryside, and the stories say so.