World population: the climb to ten billion

Updated Nov 1, 2026

An infographic poster in one HTML page: three hero numbers, an interactive stacked area chart, a bar timeline and a sparkline of twelve thousand years. Every chart is inline SVG drawn by a few lines of script from the numbers in the page, and every color is a token that switches with the site's dark mode.

At a glance

8.23bn people alive in 2025, more than three times the 1950 count

10.3bn the projected peak, reached in the mid-2080s before a slow decline

×17 Africa's growth from 1950 to 2100, from 228 million to 3.8 billion

Population by region

billions, 1950–2100 · hover for values

Asia
Africa
Europe
Latin America
Northern America
Oceania

Asia peaks at 5.29 billion around 2055; after that, nearly all growth is African.

Years to add each billion

2 bn1927122
3 bn196033
4 bn197515
5 bn198712
6 bn199811
7 bn201012
8 bn202212
9 bn203715
10 bn206124

Bars in years; * UN medium-variant projection. The first billion: 1805.

The last 12,000 years

billions

For 11,800 of those years the line is flat: it took until 1805 to reach one billion, and only 220 more to reach eight.

Data table

Year	Asia	Africa	Europe	Latin America	N. America	Oceania	World

How it's built

Hero numbers are a wrapping flex row whose 1px gap shows the border color through, so the tiles get hairline dividers without a single border rule.
The stacked area is computed in the browser: each region's band is a path from its baseline to its top, and an invisible overlay snaps the crosshair to the nearest five-year step. A ResizeObserver redraws it at the real width, so the labels stay 11px on a phone.
The billion timeline is no chart library at all: each bar is a ::before whose width is a --years custom property, and the projected rows switch to a hatched fill.

Source: UN World Population Prospects 2024, with the long-run series from HYDE and Gapminder, as compiled by Our World in Data.

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