Infant mortality rate

Description: Estimated number of deaths of children aged under one year, per 100 live births .
Data source: United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2025) – processed by Our World in Data
Unit: deaths per 100 live births
Date range: 1931-2024
Last updated: 2026-06-09
Next expected update: 2027-06-09
Managed by: Fiona Spooner and Tuna Acisu

In countries hit by a humanitarian crisis, the UN IGME fits its trend with the crisis years set aside and then adds the crisis deaths back, so a few countries show a sharp one-year spike: Rwanda in 1994, Somalia in 2011, the Central African Republic in 2009, 2019 and 2022. For the Central African Republic these come from mortality surveys compiled by Gang et al. (2023). They are all-cause excess deaths, added for the years each survey was run rather than spread across the longer period the surveys point to.

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How did Our World in Data process this 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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Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Aggregate measures for continents are calculated by Our World in Data, using our definition of the continents found here.

We do this by calculating a weighted average from the national rates, using the respective denominators (e.g. live births or children under 5) as weights.

Data sources

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation

The United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) was formed in 2004 to share data on child mortality, improve methods for child mortality estimation, report on progress towards child survival goals, and enhance country capacity to produce timely and properly assessed estimates of child mortality. The UN IGME is led by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and includes the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank Group and the United Nations Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs as full members.

UN IGME updates its child mortality estimates annually after reviewing newly available data and assessing data quality. The web portal contains the latest UN IGME estimates of child mortality at the country, regional and global levels, and the data used to derive them.

Retrieved on

June 9, 2026

Retrieved from

https://childmortality.org/all-cause-mortality/data

Citation

This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data.

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2026).

How to cite

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: Infant mortality rate”, part of the following publication: Saloni Dattani, Fiona Spooner, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser (2023) - “Child and Infant Mortality”. Data adapted from United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261102-112946/grapher/infant-mortality.html [online resource] (archived on November 2, 2026).

How to cite this data

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

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2025) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2025) – processed by Our World in Data. “Infant mortality rate – UN IGME” [dataset]. United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, “United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation 2025” [original data]. Retrieved November 2, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261102-112946/grapher/infant-mortality.html (archived on November 2, 2026).

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. 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.

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