What is the Human Development Index?

The HDI is a UNDP composite measure of average achievement in three dimensions: a long and healthy life (life expectancy), knowledge (years of schooling) and a decent standard of living (gross national income per capita). It is reported as a number between 0 and 1.

How are the development tiers defined?

UNDP groups countries into four bands by HDI value: Very High at 0.800 and above, High from 0.700 to 0.799, Medium from 0.550 to 0.699, and Low below 0.550. The tool applies these exact thresholds to classify each country.

Does a high GDP guarantee a high HDI?

Not always. HDI also rewards health and education, so a wealthy country with weak schooling or short life expectancy can score lower than its income alone would suggest, and vice versa. Income is only one of the three components.

How current are these HDI values?

They reflect a recent UNDP Human Development Report and are rounded to three decimals. HDI is published annually with a lag, so the latest official report may differ slightly from the figures shown here.

Why is HDI between 0 and 1?

Each of the three dimension indices is normalized to a 0-to-1 scale using fixed minimum and maximum reference values, and the HDI is their geometric mean. This keeps the headline number comparable across countries and over time.

Human Development Index Reference

Email me this result

Get this tool's output sent to your inbox, plus one useful tool a week. No spam, unsubscribe any time.

Human Development Index reference

The Human Development Index (HDI) is the UNDP’s headline measure of well-being, combining health, education and income into a single number from 0 to 1. This reference shows each country’s HDI value and its official development tier, so you can compare countries beyond GDP alone.

How it works

HDI is the geometric mean of three normalized sub-indices — a life-expectancy index, an education index, and an income index. The tool stores the published HDI value and then assigns the tier using UNDP’s fixed thresholds:

HDI ≥ 0.800   → Very High
0.700–0.799   → High
0.550–0.699   → Medium
< 0.550       → Low

Sorting by score ranks countries by overall human development; sorting by name gives a plain lookup. Because HDI blends three dimensions, a country’s position can differ from a pure income ranking — health and schooling carry equal weight with money.

Tips and example

Top of the table is consistently held by states like Switzerland, Norway and Iceland, all comfortably in the Very High band above 0.95.
A country can sit in the Very High tier on the strength of long life expectancy and strong schooling even if its income is not the world’s highest.
The 0.800 line is the most consequential boundary: crossing it moves a country into the “Very High” group used in many policy comparisons.
For official ranks and the exact year, cite the specific UNDP Human Development Report, since values are revised annually.