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Data

United Nations membership status

About this data

United Nations membership status
Membership is defined along current countries and their borders.
Source
United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 15, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1945–2024

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

United Nations – United Nations member states

This dataset contains the list of member states of the United Nations, with their date of admission.

Retrieved on
May 15, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states
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.
United Nations - Member States (2025).

This dataset contains the list of member states of the United Nations, with their date of admission.

Retrieved on
May 15, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states
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.
United Nations - Member States (2025).

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.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

The list of current UN members has been expanded with non-member entities we can map but are not included in the original list. Added entities include Taiwan, Palestine and Kosovo, among others.

Reuse this work

  • 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: United Nations membership status”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada (2023) - “State Capacity”. Data adapted from United Nations. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260417-111409/grapher/united-nations-membership-status.html [online resource] (archived on April 17, 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:

United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “United Nations membership status” [dataset]. United Nations, “United Nations member states” [original data]. Retrieved April 17, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260417-111409/grapher/united-nations-membership-status.html (archived on April 17, 2026).

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