How many of your generation are still here?

Method. We follow one birth cohort forward in time along the diagonal of a Lexis diagram: for each age the cohort has lived through, we look up the mortality rate for that age in the calendar year they were that age, and multiply the resulting year-by-year survival probabilities together. The result is the estimated share of the original birth cohort still alive today. This doesn't account for people moving into or out of the country, so it isn't quite the same as "how many people born there that year still live there" — it's the fate of the birth cohort itself, wherever its members live now.

Sources. Mortality data comes from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) — about 40 countries, some with records back to the 1700s — and the United Nations' World Population Prospects 2024 (WPP), which covers every country from 1950 and adds projections to 2100, used here for the most recent years and for very old ages. Where both sources cover the same age and year, we use HMD's figure.

Why some countries start in 1950. For countries outside the HMD, the UN's data begins in 1950. We can't know how many babies born there before 1950 died in their first years, so we don't show results for those birth years rather than guess.

Projections. Recorded and estimated data runs to 2023. Everything after that — including the last few years up to today — comes from the UN's medium-variant projections, and is drawn as a dashed line. The "Looking ahead" figures are projections too: averages for a whole population, not predictions for any one person.

Very old ages. The UN tables stop at an open-ended "100 and over" group. We assume the same yearly death rate applies at every age from 100 to 110 and treat 110 as the end of the table. This affects only the last fraction of a percent of any cohort.

Citations. HMD. Human Mortality Database. Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany), University of California, Berkeley (USA), and French Institute for Demographic Studies (France). Available at www.mortality.org (data downloaded on 27 August 2026). Licensed under CC BY 4.0. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024, Online Edition. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 IGO. Map outlines from Natural Earth. Our figures are derived from these sources; the organisations above haven't reviewed or endorsed them.