Terms and conditions
Effective August 13, 2026
Plain terms for a reference site. You may use what is here, including commercially, provided you carry the attributions the underlying sources require and do not present our figures as something they are not.
What this site is
WorldFactbooks is a reference work: the final edition of the CIA World Factbook (data as of January 2026), preserved in full, alongside statistics re-fetched from primary sources. It covers 254 countries and territories. It is published as-is by an independent project.
We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency or any government, and we do not use the CIA seal. The Factbook's own content is used because it is a US Government work in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105, not under any licence granted to us.
Accuracy, and its limits
Every figure on this site is published with its source and the year it was observed. We take that seriously and the pipeline is built to fail rather than publish a figure it cannot stand behind. But we are a compiler of other people's statistics, not their author, and we do not warrant that any figure is accurate, current, or fit for your purpose.
Two limits are worth stating outright. Archived Factbook values are frozen at January 2026 and are labelled as historical wherever they appear; they are not current and will never be updated. And upstream sources revise their own data, sometimes substantially, so a figure here reflects what its source published on the date shown and nothing more. If a decision of consequence rests on a number, verify it against the primary source we cite for it.
To the extent permitted by law, this site is provided without warranty of any kind, and we accept no liability for loss arising from its use. If you find an error, please tell us — corrections are the point of a reference work.
Using the data
You may read, quote, cite, and reuse the data here, including in commercial work. You do not need our permission. What you do need is to carry the licence terms of whichever source a figure came from, and every figure on this site names its source so you can tell which applies:
| Source | Licence | What it requires |
|---|---|---|
| CIA World Factbook | Public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105) | Nothing. Attribution is courtesy, not obligation. |
| World Bank, ILOSTAT, Our World in Data | CC BY 4.0 | Credit the source. |
| UN Population Division | CC BY 3.0 IGO | Credit the source. |
| Wikidata | CC0 | Nothing. |
| mledoze/countries reference data | ODbL 1.0 | Credit, and share adaptations of the database alike. |
Full attribution strings are on the sources page.
Our own contribution — the page text, the comparisons we compute, the way the archive is organised — is offered under CC BY 4.0. Credit "WorldFactbooks" with a link and you are covered.
One thing we ask you not to do: do not strip the observation years off these figures and republish them as current. A number without its year is the problem this site exists to fix.
Automated access
Crawling is welcome, including by AI assistants and their training crawlers; our llms.txt and per-country JSON and Markdown endpoints exist precisely so you do not have to scrape the HTML. Please identify your crawler honestly and keep request rates reasonable. We reserve the right to block traffic that degrades the site for readers.
Changes and contact
These terms may change; the effective date above will change with them, and material changes will be noted on this page rather than made quietly. Questions, corrections, licensing queries and takedown requests all go to the same place: the contact page.
See also our privacy policy, which describes what we do and do not collect, and our methodology, which describes exactly how each figure gets here.