The Human Mortality Database (HMD) is a research resource that provides detailed mortality and population data for national populations with high-quality vital statistics. It includes original calculations of death rates and life tables, as well as the underlying data — such as birth counts, death counts, and census-based population estimates — used to produce these metrics.

Its scope is limited to countries with virtually complete death registration and census coverage, mostly wealthy and industrialized nations. The database’s core mission is to document the historical rise in human longevity and support research into its causes and implications. HMD follows a rigorous, uniform methodology focused on transparency, reproducibility, and comparability, while acknowledging limitations such as age misreporting and data coverage issues.

Each country’s dataset is curated and quality-checked by dedicated researchers, ensuring reliability for demographic and public health analysis.

The World Population Prospects 2024 is the 28th edition of the official estimates and projections of the global population published by the United Nations since 1951. The estimates are based on all available sources of data on population size and levels of fertility, mortality, and international migration for 237 countries or areas.

For each revision, any new, recent, and historical, information that has become available from population censuses, vital registration of births and deaths, and household surveys is considered to produce consistent time series of population estimates for each country or areas from 1950 to today

For the estimation period between 1950 and 2023, data from 1,910 censuses were considered in the present evaluation, which is 79 more than the 2022 revision. In some countries, population registers based on administrative data systems provide the necessary information. Population data from censuses or registers referring to 2019 or later were available for 114 countries or areas, representing 48 percent of the 237 countries or areas included in this analysis (and 54 percent of the world population). For 43 countries or areas, the most recent available population count was from the period 2014-2018, and for another 57 locations from the period 2009-2013. For the remaining 23 countries or areas, the most recent available census data were from before 2009, that is more than 15 years ago.