About
An almanac for every birthday
Born Edition turns a birth date into a small almanac: what happened that year, where you stand among everyone alive and everyone ever born, and a card to share.
How we count
The edition size is the number of babies born worldwide that year, from the United Nations, World Population Prospects 2024, medium variant (population by single age on 1 July 2026; births per year 1950-2026).
“Younger than you” uses the UN estimate of the world population by single year of age on 1 July 2026. We place your exact age in it.
“Born before you” starts from the Population Reference Bureau estimate of about 107.9 billion people born before 1950 (Kaneda and Haub, 2022) and adds the UN count of births year by year until your birthday.
“Still in circulation” is the UN estimate of people alive in 2026 at the ages your year has now.
These are estimates, so we round them and say “about”. Sources: UN World Population Prospects, Population Reference Bureau. Checked on November 13, 2026.
The facts
Every fact on a year page shows its source. We use museums, official sites, encyclopedias and archives, and we leave out anything we could not confirm. If you spot a mistake, tell us and we fix it.
The rest of your page
Birthday twins come from Wikidata, people with a known birth date and articles in 40 or more Wikipedia languages. We rank them by that count and leave out politicians, military figures, royals and people with disputed birth dates.
The No. 1 song is the top of the Billboard Hot 100 on the first chart dated on or after your birthday, from August 4, 1958 on.
Then and now: first-class letter rates from the USPS Historian, the federal minimum wage from the US Department of Labor (unchanged at $7.25 since July 24, 2009), and inflation from the annual Consumer Price Index published by the Minneapolis Fed.
How common your birthday is uses US births per day from 1994 to 2014 (CDC and Social Security Administration, compiled by FiveThirtyEight). The Moon is calculated from the average lunar cycle at noon UTC, so treat it as “about”.
Your sign is for fun. The sky part uses the dates the Sun enters each constellation under the official 1930 boundaries, from astronomer James B. Kaler. The quotes come from public-domain books on Project Gutenberg, checked word for word.
Privacy
Your birthday never leaves your device: the page does the math in your browser, and the date only lives in the address bar after the # sign, which browsers don’t send to servers. We count visits with GoatCounter, which uses no cookies and keeps no personal data.