Data and sources

Flagdex is built on open data. Every figure on the site comes from one of the sources below, and this page states exactly which, along with the vintage, so you can judge and verify it yourself.

Dataset compiled 2026-07-02 250 countries 217 with population

Sources

Base country data

Country names, official names, ISO 3166-1 codes (alpha-2, alpha-3 and numeric), capital cities, currencies, international calling codes, region and subregion, official languages, land borders, flag emoji, area, landlocked status and internet top-level domains come from the mledoze/countries open dataset, published under the Open Database License (ODbL 1.0).

Population

Population figures come from the World Bank, indicator Total Population (SP.POP.TOTL), using each country’s most recent available year. World Bank data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence. This dataset was last updated by the World Bank on 2026-07-01. A small number of territories and partially-recognised states are not listed separately by the World Bank; where an authoritative national estimate exists we note it, and otherwise population is shown as not available.

Flags

Flag images are public-domain SVGs sourced from flagcdn.com, which builds on the widely used flag-icons project. They are free to use, including for print and in the classroom.

How it is served

All of this is compiled into a single dataset that ships with the site, so pages make no runtime API calls and load instantly. The same dataset is exposed as a free static JSON API.

A note on contested definitions

Some groupings on this site, such as the Middle East, the Balkans or Eastern Europe, are cultural and geopolitical rather than strictly geographic. Their membership varies between sources. On each of those pages we state the definition we use so nothing is left implicit.

Corrections

Found something wrong or out of date? Please tell us on the contact page. We rebuild from source periodically and update the vintage shown above.