Data and sources
Flagdex is built on open data. Every figure on the site comes from one of the sources below, and this page states exactly which, along with the vintage, so you can judge and verify it yourself.
Dataset compiled 2026-07-02 250 countries 217 with population
What each number on this site counts
Different pages quote different totals, and every one of them is correct for what it counts. They are all derived from the same dataset at build time, never typed into copy, so they cannot drift apart. This table is the one place that defines them.
| Total | Value | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Countries and territories | 250 | Every record in the dataset: sovereign states plus dependencies and territories that hold their own ISO 3166-1 code. This is the number on the homepage, the poster and the API. |
| Sovereign states | 194 | Records marked independent in ISO 3166-1 terms. |
| United Nations members | 193 | UN member states. Vatican City is a Permanent Observer State rather than a member, which is corrected here against the source dataset. |
| With a capital city | 245 | Records that list at least one capital. The remaining 5 are uninhabited or administered from elsewhere. |
| Capital pages | 194 | Capital pagesexist for sovereign states with a capital only, because “what is the capital of X” is a question about countries. Territories keep their capital on the country page. |
| With population data | 217 | Records with a World Bank figure. The World Bank does not list every territory separately. |
| With a flag emoji | 249 | Records with a regional-indicator emoji. One record has no assigned emoji pair, so the emoji page shows 249 rather than 250. |
Sources
Base country data
Country names, official names, ISO 3166-1 codes (alpha-2, alpha-3 and numeric), capital cities, currencies, international calling codes, region and subregion, official languages, land borders, flag emoji, area, landlocked status and internet top-level domains come from the mledoze/countries open dataset, published under the Open Database License (ODbL 1.0).
Population
Population figures come from the World Bank, indicator Total Population (SP.POP.TOTL), using each country’s most recent available year. World Bank data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence. This dataset was last updated by the World Bank on 2026-07-01. A small number of territories and partially-recognised states are not listed separately by the World Bank; where an authoritative national estimate exists we note it, and otherwise population is shown as not available.
Flags
Flag images are public-domain SVGs sourced from flagcdn.com, which builds on the widely used flag-icons project. They are free to use, including for print and in the classroom.
Flag meanings
The “What does the flag mean?” sections on individual country pages are hand-written, not auto-generated, and each one is sourced individually. Every paragraph cites the specific source it was drawn from directly underneath the text, typically a Wikipedia flag article or, where Wikipedia is thin, a body such as The Flag Institute. Only countries with a documented, sourced explanation are covered; where a flag’s popular “meaning” is folklore or simply unrecorded, the country is left off the flag meanings list rather than filled in with invented symbolism.
Flag colours
The colour filter and the flags by colour pages are computed, never eyeballed. At build time every flag SVG is rasterised to 120 by 80 pixels and each opaque pixel is classified into a colour family from its hue, saturation and lightness. A family counts as part of the flag when it covers at least 7 percentof the flag’s opaque area, which keeps outlines, anti-aliasing and small emblem details out of the answer.
Two deliberate exceptions: a very dark but strongly saturated colour keeps its hue rather than being called black, so Pakistan’s bottle green stays green; and red reaches into the crimson range, because a great many flag reds sit there. Low-saturation greys are ignored entirely. The result is a claim you can check: run the script against the same public-domain SVGs and you get the same list.
What this method does not capture is layout. Two flags with the same colour families can look nothing alike, which is why the “same colours” section on a country page is described as a colour match and not as a look-alike ruling.
Disputed and partially recognised territories
The dataset follows ISO 3166-1, which is a coding standard rather than a political statement, and this site does not add a judgement on top of it. In practice that means: Kosovo appears under the user-assigned code XK and is not marked independent; Taiwan and Palestine appear with their ISO entries and are likewise not marked independent; and Western Sahara appears under EH. Vatican City is marked independent but not a United Nations member, because the Holy See is a Permanent Observer State.
Where a place is not marked independent, the site calls it a territory rather than a country, in the title, in the description and in the body text. That is a statement about the coding standard, not about anyone’s claim.
How it is served
All of this is compiled into a single dataset that ships with the site, so pages make no runtime API calls and load instantly. The same dataset is exposed as a free static JSON API.
A note on contested definitions
Some groupings on this site, such as the Middle East, the Balkans or Eastern Europe, are cultural and geopolitical rather than strictly geographic. Their membership varies between sources. On each of those pages we state the definition we use so nothing is left implicit.
Corrections
Found something wrong or out of date? Please tell us on the contact page. We rebuild from source periodically and update the vintage shown above.