# Child mortality rate: source and method

## Citation

Gapminder (2015); UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2025) – processed by Our World in Data. “Child mortality rate – Gapminder; UN IGME – Long-run data” \[dataset\]. United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, “United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation 2025”; Gapminder, “Child mortality rate under age five v7”; Gapminder based on UN IGME & UN WPP, “Under-five Mortality v11” \[original data\].

## What it measures

Long-run estimated share of newborns who die before reaching the age of five. Unit: deaths per 100 live births.

## How the data were processed

This indicator is a combination of data from two sources:

  - Gapminder, which provides estimates of child mortality rates for the years 1800 to 2015.

  - The UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) provides estimates of child mortality rates, for some countries from 1932 onward.

For years where data from both sources is available, we prioritize the UN IGME data. See [this page](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SaeXxXXeBAATXH3HTmonyPiBd7j0laE6GBUlcboTgYk/edit) for more details on which source is used for each data point.

In the Gapminder dataset we remove rows where the source is labeled as "Guesstimate" or "Model based on Life Expectancy" to try and ensure we use the best available data.

We remove data for Austria before 1830 from the Gapminder dataset, as there is a jump in 1830 that is likely an error.

## Where it was taken from

- Chart: [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality)
- Full metadata: [https://api.ourworldindata.org/v1/indicators/1271844.metadata.json](https://api.ourworldindata.org/v1/indicators/1271844.metadata.json)
- Last updated by Our World in Data: 2026-06-09. Taken for this site on 22 October 2026.

Our World in Data publishes its data under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence; data produced by third parties keep their own licence, given in the full metadata. [How this site takes its figures](/method) · [All child mortality rate figures](/child-mortality).

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