When will each country’s population peak?

Every population eventually stops growing. This map shades each country by the year it reaches its demographic peak, the moment its population stops rising and begins to fall, under the UN's medium-variant projection. Red countries are already past their peak; green countries are still growing as the century closes.

The pattern is sharply regional. Around 65 countries and territories have already peaked and are now shrinking, almost all of Europe and East Asia among them. China is set to join them around its early-2030s peak. At the other extreme, roughly 76 are still projected to be growing in 2100, overwhelmingly across sub-Saharan Africa, where Nigeria, DR Congo and Tanzania keep climbing all the way to the projection's 2100 horizon.

Between those poles sits most of the Americas, the Middle East and South and South-East Asia, which peak somewhere in the second half of the century. India, the world's most populous country, peaks around 2062 before edging down. The result is a century in which global growth doesn't stop everywhere at once; it migrates, country by country, from the rich and ageing world toward the young and growing one.