The World Factbook: archived, and continued

For over six decades the CIA published the world's most-cited country reference. On February 4, 2026 it stopped: the Factbook was taken offline with no successor, and every cia.gov Factbook URL now redirects to a single farewell story. This page explains exactly what of it lives on here, what we keep frozen, and what we refresh.

What we preserve, unchanged

Every one of our 261 profiles contains the complete final-edition Factbook entry for that entity: every section the CIA published for it, exactly as it last stood (data as of January 2026). The Factbook's full outline runs to thirteen sections, from Introduction through Transnational Issues, but it printed all thirteen for only 52 entities. It left out what it had nothing to report: the median profile carries 11 sections and the range across our corpus runs from 8 to 13. Every country page states its own number rather than the maximum. This text is a United States Government work in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105, it is always labeled as historical, and we never silently edit it.

What we refresh

The figures that go stale fastest (population, GDP, growth, inflation, life expectancy, leaders) are overlaid from live sources (World Bank, IMF, UN Population Division, Wikidata) with the source and observation year printed next to every number. 216 of the 261 profiles also carry a "then and now" table putting the Factbook's final figure beside today's; the rest are entities no live source covers, so there is no "now" to put beside the archive and we do not manufacture one. Most recent data change anywhere on the site: August 12, 2026. The methodology page documents every field's source and cadence.

Fixing broken citations

Millions of citations, syllabi, and Wikipedia references point at dead cia.gov URLs. Our citation resolver covers the four URL schemes cia.gov used between 1997 and 2026, plus rank-order, field and attachment paths, and all 269 GEC country codes, including dissolved entities. Give it a link from any of those eras and it returns the archived snapshot plus a live replacement with ready-made APA, MLA, and Chicago citations. Hand it a path outside those patterns and it says so and sends you to the Wayback Machine, rather than guessing.

Where to get the raw archive

We deliberately do not re-host the full 36-year archive; others already do it well. For bulk historical data: the factbook.json project maintains the final edition as JSON (CC0); the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine holds roughly 29,000 snapshots of Factbook pages going back to January 2017, with sparser coverage reaching into the 1990s; and worldfactbookarchive.org offers machine-readable editions from 1990 to 2025 with bulk downloads. Our own refreshed dataset is available per country as Markdown and JSON: see sources.

Timeline

1962 First classified edition of the Factbook.
1971 First unclassified edition published.
1997 Factbook goes online at odci.gov, then cia.gov.
2021 Site redesign moves pages to /the-world-factbook/ slugs.
Jan 22, 2026 Final content update.
Feb 4, 2026 Publication ends; all URLs redirect to a farewell page.

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