Literacy rate — all countries

Literacy rate — OECD

Literacy rate in the OECD in 2020 — 97.21%.

2020 97.21%
World rank
Period maximum 97.21%2020
Period minimum 97.21%2020

Trend over time

2020–2020 · % of population aged 15+

Change over the period: +0 pp

Comparison, 2020

How the value compares with the world and the groups this territory belongs to: OECD

OECD 97.21%
World 86.98%
Literacy rate — OECD, by year OECD All countries CSV XLSX
Year % Change, pp
2020 97.21

About the indicator

The share of the population aged 15 and older able to read and write a short simple statement about their everyday life. The UNESCO definition is deliberately minimal — it is the threshold of functional literacy, not an assessment of the quality of education. In most countries the data come from censuses and surveys, so they are updated irregularly.

Important: The series is incomplete: values are published only for the years in which a census or a literacy survey was conducted.

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), license CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.