Median age in Malawi
The median age in Malawi is 17.8 years (2024): half the population is older, half younger. That is 12.8 years younger than the world median of 30.6, and makes Malawi the 178th oldest of 193 countries.
Key numbers
Malawi among its neighbours
In plain language
Line up everyone in Malawi by age. The person in the middle is 17.8. 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 17.8 is younger 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 Malawi is 67.4 years, so a person at the median age has, on a rough reckoning, about 49.6 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 Malawi?
- 17.8 years in 2024, by the UN World Population Prospects 2024. Half of the people in Malawi are younger than 17.8 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 Malawi's population young or old?
- Young. Malawi is 12.8 years below the world median of 30.6, and ranks 178th 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 Malawi compare to Zambia?
- Zambia has a median age of 17.7, 0.1 years younger than Malawi. The two sit next to each other in the ranking, at 16th and 15th youngest.
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