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Data

Years of schooling

by level of education and gender
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What you should know about this indicator

  • This indicator shows the average number of years that adults in a country have spent in formal education.
  • It reflects the overall educational attainment of the population based on what they have already completed.
  • The calculation converts each person's highest completed education level into years - for example, someone who finished high school counts as having roughly 12 years of schooling, while someone who never attended school counts as 0 years.
  • The data comes from censuses and surveys of adults aged 25 and older, including only formal education starting from primary school.
  • This indicator captures how much schooling adults have accumulated over their lifetimes, showing the results of past investments in education systems.
  • Higher values indicate a population with stronger educational foundations, but the measure does not account for education quality or informal learning.
  • The data may not reflect recent progress in countries with infrequent surveys or outdated census information.
  • UNDP originally obtained this indicator from: Barro and Lee (2018), Eurostat (2024), ICF Macro Demographic and Health Surveys (various years), UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2024) and UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (various years).
Average years of schooling
UNDP
Average number of years adults aged 25 and older have spent in formal education.
Source
UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 7, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1990–2023
Unit
years

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

UNDP, Human Development Report – Human Development Report

Artificial intelligence (AI) has broken into a dizzying gallop. While AI feats grab headlines, they privilege technology in a make-believe vacuum, obscuring what really matters: people's choices.

The choices that people have and can realize, within ever expanding freedoms, are essential to human development, whose goal is for people to live lives they value and have reason to value. A world with AI is flush with choices the exercise of which is both a matter of human development and a means to advance it.

Going forward, development depends less on what AI can do—not on how human-like it is perceived to be—and more on mobilizing people's imaginations to reshape economies and societies to make the most of it. Instead of trying vainly to predict what will happen, the 2025's Human Development Report asks what choices can be made so that new development pathways for all countries dot the horizon, helping everyone have a shot at thriving in a world with AI.

For more details, refer to https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/documentation-and-downloads

Retrieved on
May 7, 2025
Retrieved from
https://hdr.undp.org/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2025. Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI. New York.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has broken into a dizzying gallop. While AI feats grab headlines, they privilege technology in a make-believe vacuum, obscuring what really matters: people's choices.

The choices that people have and can realize, within ever expanding freedoms, are essential to human development, whose goal is for people to live lives they value and have reason to value. A world with AI is flush with choices the exercise of which is both a matter of human development and a means to advance it.

Going forward, development depends less on what AI can do—not on how human-like it is perceived to be—and more on mobilizing people's imaginations to reshape economies and societies to make the most of it. Instead of trying vainly to predict what will happen, the 2025's Human Development Report asks what choices can be made so that new development pathways for all countries dot the horizon, helping everyone have a shot at thriving in a world with AI.

For more details, refer to https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/documentation-and-downloads

Retrieved on
May 7, 2025
Retrieved from
https://hdr.undp.org/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2025. Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI. New York.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

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  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Average years of schooling”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2023) - “Global Education”. Data adapted from UNDP, Human Development Report. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260410-220747/grapher/years-of-schooling.html [online resource] (archived on April 10, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Average years of schooling – UNDP” [dataset]. UNDP, Human Development Report, “Human Development Report” [original data]. Retrieved April 10, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260410-220747/grapher/years-of-schooling.html (archived on April 10, 2026).

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