About Population Statistics — who makes it and how

Population Statistics publishes population figures for 246 countries and for towns and cities worldwide, drawn entirely from open official sources and free to use. Coverage is deepest for the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain and Portugal.

Who makes this

James Burfield builds data-led websites and works as an SEO consultant in Bath. He rebuilt Population Statistics on the domain that formerly published the World Gazetteer, and restored that reference work's 2005 edition. How the rebuild was done is written up as a case study on SEOBurf.

This is not an institution or a data vendor. It is one person publishing official statistics in a form that is easier to read than the spreadsheets they arrive in, and being explicit about where every number comes from.

What this site is for

Population figures are surprisingly hard to quote correctly. Ask how many people live in London and the honest answer is three different numbers: about 8.9 million in Greater London, roughly 9.7 million in the built-up area, and 8,072 in the City of London. Most published lists pick one silently, which is why no two of them agree.

So the aim here is narrow: give a straight number, say which geography it describes, name the source and its vintage, and be honest about what it does not measure. Where a figure is uncertain or a definition is contested, the page says so rather than rounding the problem away.

How the data is chosen

Sources are ranked by how defensible they are, and never mixed within a single table:

Statutory registers — where the law requires registration, the count is the full population of those things. Food businesses must register with their council, so the Food Standards Agency register is used for takeaway and restaurant counts.
Official statistics — national statistics offices. UK annual population series come from ONS, NRS and NISRA mid-year estimates via the ONS Nomis service.
Open geographic databases — GeoNames for the breadth of world place data, which draws on national censuses of varying dates. Recent, but not same-year, and labelled as such.

Full detail, including licences and known limitations, is on the sources and method page.

The World Gazetteer archive

This domain published the World Gazetteer, Stefan Helders' population reference, from 2001 until it went offline in 2013. Thousands of Wikipedia citations still point here. Its 2005 edition has been recovered and restored as an archive, clearly dated and credited, with a free download. Those pages carry 2005 figures only; they are never presented as current.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, or a definition is doing something misleading, please say so via SEOBurf. Corrections are made at the source-data level so they persist through the next rebuild rather than being patched onto one page.