GDP per capita
GDP at current US dollars divided by mid-year population: average economic output per person.
How it is measured
Computed from the nominal GDP and population series described on their own pages.
Where the number came from
Dividing output by population is an obvious move, and it was made almost as soon as national accounts existed, but it acquired institutional force in 1989 when the World Bank began classifying economies into income groups on a per-capita basis. That classification decides which countries can borrow on concessional terms, which is why the threshold values are negotiated as carefully as the data. The Bank calculates them with its own Atlas method, a three-year smoothed exchange rate designed to stop a country being reclassified because its currency had a bad quarter. The underlying tension has never gone away: a per-capita average is the most widely used proxy for how well a country’s people live, and it is not a measure of that at all. It is total production divided by everybody, including production that leaves the country and people who receive none of it.
Worked example: Ireland, and why a country can be richer than its residents
Our 2025 table puts Ireland at about $131,600 per person, ahead of Norway at roughly $94,600 and the United States at about $90,000, with Singapore near $98,800. On the face of it Ireland is one of the richest societies on earth. The Irish government does not believe its own number, and says so: multinational firms domiciled in Ireland book contract manufacturing and intellectual-property income there, which lands in Irish GDP without any corresponding activity or income inside the country. Ireland’s Central Statistics Office responded by publishing a separate headline measure, modified gross national income or GNI*, specifically to strip those flows out, and it comes in far below GDP. Nothing about the $131,600 is a mistake; it is what the standard definition produces. But it is the clearest illustration available of why per-capita GDP should be read as production per resident rather than income per resident, and why a figure that looks anomalous is usually worth one more question rather than one more decimal place.
Figures read from our own gdp per capita table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
World Bank WDI (NY.GDP.PCAP.CD); IMF WEO for gaps.
Refresh cadence: Same as GDP: World Bank quarterly; taken on each rebuild.
What to watch for
An average, not a median: oil states and financial centres score high while typical incomes may differ greatly. Does not adjust for local prices; see the price level page for that adjustment.
CIA World Factbook equivalent field: "Real GDP per capita" (frozen at the January 2026 final edition; our figures continue from live sources).