Data and sources
Everything on All 195 comes from a public source we can name. Where a source leaves room for doubt, a person decides, writes down why, and applies the same rule to every country.
Which countries. The 193 member states of the United Nations and its two permanent observer states, the Holy See and Palestine. See why 195.
Borders, names, regions and country codes come from Natural Earth, a public-domain map dataset used by atlases and newsrooms. We use its borders unchanged. Country codes are ISO 3166-1; regions follow the UN geoscheme (M49).
Capitals come from Natural Earth too, but its capital flag is not reliable enough on its own: it lists Johannesburg as a capital of South Africa, for example. So every country with more than one candidate, or none, was decided by hand under one rule: the capital as the state officially designates it, not the largest city and not a separate seat of government. Where that differs from what people might expect, as with Sucre and La Paz in Bolivia, the decision and the reason are recorded.
Land borders come from Natural Earth’s boundary lines, which name the country on each side of every border. Disputed stretches and lines of control count, since they still run between two neighbours. A border with a place that is not one of the 195, such as Western Sahara or Kosovo, is not listed, so Morocco and Mauritania, for example, do not appear as neighbours. Sea borders never count.
Flags come from flag-icons, an open-source collection of the official national flags.
Population, life expectancy and median age come from the United Nations' World Population Prospects 2024, the figures Wikipedia's population lists use. They are the UN's projection for 1 July of the current year, and move on each January. A recent national census can differ; Albania's 2023 census, for example, counted fewer people than the UN projection, which does not include it yet.
Area comes from the UN Demographic Yearbook 2024, table 3, as reported by each country. Where the Yearbook says a figure covers less than the whole country, for example land area only or without Greenland for Denmark, the page says so next to the number. One figure in the 2024 Yearbook is plainly wrong (Kyrgyzstan, 199.95 km²); there we use the 2023 Yearbook. Sudan has no figure in the Yearbook; its area comes from the World Bank.
GDP and GDP per person come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators in current US dollars, for the latest year available, which the page shows. Figures more than four years old are not shown; today that leaves out North Korea, the Holy See, South Sudan and Yemen.
Currencies come from the ISO 4217 list, internet domains from IANA's root zone database, and UN membership dates from the United Nations.
How we check. Every figure is compared with a second source: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Wikidata. The data is refreshed from every source once a month, and each change is reviewed before it goes live. Where they differ by more than a few percent, a person looks at why and writes the reason down before the figure is published. Most differences are about definitions, such as whether coastal waters count as area or which exchange rate turns a currency into dollars.
What we leave out. We only show a fact when we have a source for it that we trust and can name, with its year. Where a source has no current figure for a country, the page shows nothing rather than a guess.
Found a mistake? Write to hello@all195.com and tell us which page and which source says otherwise.