Median age in China
The median age in China is 39.6 years (2024): half the population is older, half younger. That is 9.0 years older than the world median of 30.6, and makes China the 44th oldest of 193 countries.
Key numbers
China among its neighbours
In plain language
Line up everyone in China by age. The person in the middle is 39.6. That is the median: it says nothing about how old the oldest are or how many babies were born last year, only where the midpoint falls.
A median of 39.6 is older than the world's 30.6. For scale, the youngest country here, Central African Republic, has a median of 14.4 and the oldest, Japan, 49.4. Life expectancy at birth in China is 78.0 years, so a person at the median age has, on a rough reckoning, about 38.4 years ahead of them.
The 2024figure is the UN's medium-variant number; its estimates end in 2023. For a year this close the projection barely differs from an estimate, since everyone counted has already been born.
Questions
- What is the median age in China?
- 39.6 years in 2024, by the UN World Population Prospects 2024. Half of the people in China are younger than 39.6 and half are older. The median is not the average age; it is the midpoint, so a handful of very old people do not move it.
- Is China's population young or old?
- Older than most. China is 9.0 years above the world median of 30.6, and ranks 44th oldest of the 193 countries here. The youngest country, Central African Republic, has a median of 14.4; the oldest, Japan, 49.4.
- How does China compare to Luxembourg?
- Luxembourg has a median age of 39.2, 0.4 years younger than China. The two sit next to each other in the ranking, at 150th and 149th youngest.
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Compare your age in ChinaAlso by country: Average height by country, Average BMI by country, Life expectancy by country and Average income by country.