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Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Reto Stöckli

Age percentile: what share of people are younger than you

Your age percentile is the share of people alive on a given date who are younger than you. If it is 60 %, six in ten people are younger and four in ten are your age or older.

The idea

Line up everyone alive by age, from the newborns to the oldest. Your place in that line, written as a share of the whole line, is your age percentile. It answers a simple question: what part of humanity is younger than me?

For mid-2026 the UN projects a world median age, the age that splits the population into two equal halves, of 31.1 years. Anyone older than that is older than half of everyone alive.

How it is calculated

The UN World Population Prospects give the population of every country by single year of age, from 0 to 99 and a last group of 100 and over. For an age of a completed years:

  1. Add up everyone younger than a. That is the share that is certainly younger than you.
  2. Add the people of exactly your age. Within one year of age, Anthrotempo assumes people are spread evenly over the year, so someone halfway to their next birthday is placed in the middle of their year.
  3. Divide by the total population.

The result is never typed in: it is calculated in your browser from the published numbers. In the oldest group, 100 and over, the data no longer show single years, so the tool gives a range instead of one number.

Why it depends on where and when

The same age gives very different percentiles in different places. In Niger, 46% of the people are under 15 on 1 January 2026. In Japan it is 11%. A 40-year-old is therefore older than most people in Niger, but younger than the median person in Japan, where the median age is 50.2.

It also changes with time. In 1950 the world’s median age was 22.2 years. In the UN projection for 2050 it is 36.1. As the world grows older, the same age moves down the ranking.

Things to keep in mind

  • The percentile compares you with people alive on one date, not with everyone ever born.
  • Projections are labelled: for future years the numbers are the UN medium variant, not counts.
  • A percentile describes a position in an age distribution, nothing more. It says nothing about health or life expectancy.

Last updated 26 October 2026

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