Literacy rate

The share of people aged 15 and older who can read and write a simple sentence about their daily life.

The literacy rate is the share of people aged 15 and older who can read and write a simple sentence about their everyday life. Our World in Data combines historical estimates, back to the 15th century for some European countries, with recent figures from UNESCO and other sources. What counts as literate has varied between countries and over time, so compare with care. Many rich countries stopped tracking literacy in the late 20th century, once nearly everyone could read, so their series end early. It measures basic literacy, not whether people can follow complex written texts.

World map · Adult literacy rate

Year

Source: UNESCO (1957) and other sources – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-05-12) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

Over time · Adult literacy rate

Source: UNESCO (1957) and other sources – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-05-12) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

Years

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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.

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