The map that shows where people really live
Mar 10th 2026
A population cartogram built from 2018 data redraws the world by people instead of land, revealing who lives where and why conventional maps can mislead when we track global living conditions.
- A population cartogram rescales countries by number of people, not land area, so small dense countries grow and large sparsely populated countries shrink.
- This cartogram is based on 2018 data and uses 15,266 squares where each square represents 500,000 people, totaling a world population of 7.633 billion.
- China (1.415 billion) and India (1.354 billion) are the two most populous countries and together shape global trends in living conditions.
- Thirteen countries have more than 100 million people, including the United States (326.8 million), Indonesia (266.8 million), and Nigeria (195.9 million).
- Asia contains about 60 percent of the world population, Africa about 1 in 6 people, Europe about 711 million (under 10 percent), and the Americas about 1.015 billion.
- Population density extremes shift the visual map: Bangladesh has about 1,252 people per km2 while Canada has about 4 people per km2.
- Despite covering 11 percent of the world land area, Russia has under 2 percent of the world population, making it much smaller on the cartogram than on a geographic map.
- India's fertility fell to about 2.22 children per woman in 2018 and demographic momentum means its population is projected to reach roughly 1.65 billion by 2060.