When did India overtake China in population?

India overtook China in total population back in 2023. At the crossover, both countries sit at roughly 1.43 billion people. It is a milestone that has already happened, and the gap between the two has continued to widen since.

The reason is a tale of two trajectories. India is expected to edge higher before levelling off over the century, moving from about 1.44 billion in 2024 toward 1.51 billion by 2100. China, by contrast, is projected to fall sharply, going from roughly 1.42 billion to 639 million over the same period. Differences in fertility and age structure (India's median age near 28 versus China's near 40 today) explain much of the divergence.

Crossovers like this one are how the global population ranking is quietly rewritten. As faster-growing populations climb the table and slower-growing or shrinking ones slip down, the list of the world's largest countries in 2100 will look markedly different from today's. This particular change is now history is one of the clearer signals of that shift.

As with all long-range projections, the exact year carries uncertainty. Under the UN's high and low fertility scenarios the crossover could arrive earlier or later, and the figures here follow the medium variant. Still, the direction of travel, India rising relative to China, is robust across the plausible range of outcomes.