Interactive tool
The Birth Lottery
Before you did anything at all, the biggest draw of your life had already happened: which country and year you were born into. Pick a year and a country below to see what that ticket was actually worth — the odds of it, the life expectancy attached to it, and how it stacked up against every other ticket drawn that year.
Each bar is a birth-weighted percentile: the share of that year's babies born into countries with worse conditions on that measure. The headline averages the three. It measures day-one conditions only — not war, freedom, family, or which household your ticket landed in (see the inequality card below for that). Note: these odds and this index answer different questions — the ticket odds measure how common a birth was; the Luck Index measures how fortunate.
What was printed on the ticket
The fine print
The whole board, one year
Every country with data: richer to the right, longer-lived toward the top, bubble size = babies born. Your ticket in red.
If that year were 100 babies
Same roll, different year
Your birth was a specific spot on a spinning wheel of that year's births, countries sorted largest first. Hold that spot and re-spin in every year from 1950 to 2100.
How this works
The odds shown for a given year and country are simply that country's share of every baby born worldwide that year — if 4% of the world's births happened in the country you picked, your odds of landing there were 1 in 25. Life expectancy, survival rates, fertility, and the other figures are that country's actual reported values for that birth year, not estimates about you personally.
The wealth scale places a country's GDP per capita for that year against every other country's, from poorest fifth to richest fifth. GDP data only runs through 2018 and is missing for some small countries and territories; for years or places without it, the scale falls back to a life-expectancy-based rank instead, since the two track each other closely.
The ticket odds and the Luck Index answer different questions. Odds measure how common a birth was — the size of the pool you were drawn from. The Luck Index measures how fortunate — a birth-weighted percentile comparing your survival, longevity, and wealth conditions against the actual babies born that year, not against countries. A rare ticket (a small country) and a fortunate one (good day-one conditions) aren't the same thing, and a country's internal inequality — see the lottery-inside-the-lottery card — can make the ticket you actually landed on very different from its national average.
Data sources: births, life expectancy, infant mortality, fertility, mothers' ages, sex ratio at birth, deaths, and net migration come from the United Nations' World Population Prospects 2024 (estimates 1950–2023, medium-variant projections to 2100). GDP per capita comes from the Maddison Project Database 2020, in constant 2011 international dollars, available 1950–2018 for most countries. Income inequality comes from the World Bank's Poverty and Inequality Platform (Gini index), 1963–2025, where surveys exist.
These are national averages for the year of birth — the odds and conditions a newborn faced on day one, not a prediction of any individual life. Life expectancy shown is period life expectancy at birth; real people have historically outlived it.
Browse every birth year
Each year below has its own page with the full odds breakdown, top countries by births, and year-specific facts.
More from the Data Playground
Liked seeing the odds of your birth? Check the Purple Star Chart — the thousand-year-old Eastern birth chart, 12 life areas and 100+ stars, explained in plain English — or see where you rank against every adult on Earth by income or net worth.