Seventy-five years of counting
In 1951, the world began systematically counting refugees. This page is not a history of displacement — it is a history of the counting itself, and of what to watch for when reading it.
Cette page n'est pas encore disponible en français — la version anglaise est affichée ci-dessous.
From two million to today
The first annual count, in 1951, recorded 2 116 011 refugees — mostly post-war Europe. In 2025, there were 28 461 306 refugees, 64 239 352 internally displaced people, and 116 310 473 people of concern in total. But comparing 1951 to 2025 directly is dangerous: over seventy-five years, not only the world changed — who gets counted kept changing too.
Four expansions of the count
- Internally displaced people entered this dataset only from 2009 (via IDMC), and only for conflict and violence.
- Stateless people were counted systematically only from 2004, by country of residence — and many countries still do not report.
- "Other people in need of international protection" (OIP) was created in 2018 for the Venezuelan crisis.
- The distinction between "not reported" and "zero" is kept throughout this site — a grey country may host many people for whom that year simply has no figure.
How to read honestly
When comparing across years, watch the timeline: the first-collected year of every metric is marked. When comparing across countries, remember the numbers are what governments and UNHCR operations report — incentives to over- and under-count both exist. That is not a flaw in the data; it is the nature of the data. Labelling it honestly is this site's reason to exist.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page is computed at build time from world-totals.json (snapshot 21506b7d; source: UNHCR Refugee Population Statistics Database, data as of 2025-12-31). Methods and limits: methodology.