When will the world reach 9 billion people?

The world is projected to reach 9 billion people around 2038. Humanity passed 8 billion around 2023, so the journey to 9 billion takes about 15 years. That interval matters: each successive billion is arriving more slowly than the last, the clearest sign that global population growth is decelerating.

Almost all of the growth to 9 billion comes from a small number of high-fertility regions, with sub-Saharan Africa contributing the largest share. Many of the world's wealthier countries have already stopped growing, so the addition of another billion people is increasingly concentrated in younger, faster-growing nations.

These projections come from the United Nations World Population Prospects 2024, the most widely used source for long-range demographic estimates. They are scenarios, not predictions. But the broad shape of the century ahead, a slowdown and eventual peak, is consistent across the main variants.