What is the age of each country's leader?
* Mahmoud Abbas is president of the State of Palestine, but the Palestinian Authority’s governing authority is largely limited to parts of the West Bank.
Notes, sources and caveats
How to read it
Each dot is one country, placed along the axis at the age of its current leader. Dots that would overlap are nudged up or down. The oldest and youngest leader in each group are labelled; pick any other country from the menu to highlight it, or hover or tap a dot.
Who counts as the leader
The person who holds the main executive power: the prime minister in parliamentary systems and in semi-presidential ones where the government is led by the prime minister (such as Portugal, Poland, Moldova, Romania and Lebanon), the president in presidential systems and in semi-presidential ones where the president dominates (such as France), and the monarch in Gulf and other executive monarchies. Some calls are judgement calls. For Saudi Arabia we count Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, prime minister since 2022 and the de facto ruler, rather than King Salman (born 1935), who remains head of state. Pew Research Center's 2026 analysis counts the king. Using him would barely change the global figures but would change the G20 counts: three G20 leaders over 80 rather than two, and two under 50 rather than three. In Timor-Leste we count the prime minister (Pew counts the president), and in Nicaragua Daniel Ortega, co-president with Rosario Murillo. Xi and Tô Lâm are counted from taking the top party post. Many ceremonial presidents and kings are not shown.
Regions
Russia is counted in Europe and Turkey in Asia. North America includes Central America and the Caribbean.
Political regimes
Regimes use the Regimes of the World classification (Lührmann, Tannenberg and Lindberg, 2018), as scored by V-Dem for 2025 (Democracy Report v16, March 2026), via Our World in Data. In a liberal democracy, there are free and fair multiparty elections plus individual and minority rights, and the courts and legislature constrain the executive. An electoral democracy has free and fair multiparty elections without those further protections. An electoral autocracy holds multiparty elections that are not free and fair. In a closed autocracy, citizens cannot choose the chief executive or the legislature through multiparty elections.
The classification describes 2025, while the leaders are those in office today. Where the government changed in 2026 (for example Hungary, Bangladesh, Nepal and Venezuela), the regime label reflects the previous government's year. Brunei, the Bahamas and Dominica are not classified by V-Dem, and Palestine is left out because V-Dem scores the West Bank and Gaza separately, so these four are not shown in the regime view.
Accuracy and coverage
Every birth date was checked against two independent sources (English Wikipedia and Wikidata). The dataset covers 143 countries. Countries are left out where the leader's birth date could not be established reliably (including North Korea, Oman and Guinea), and those with no clear national leader. Two leaders use an official birth date that differs from other published ones: Lee Jae-myung and Tarique Rahman. The charts cover UN member states plus Palestine, a UN observer state. Taiwan, Kosovo and the Holy See are not included. Palestine is left out of the regime views, because V-Dem scores the West Bank and Gaza separately while the leader, the median age and the population cover the whole territory. Countries where the recognised government does not control all of its territory (for example Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine and Myanmar) are included and counted under the recognised government's leader.