Every edition.
Every word.
As published.

For decades the CIA World Factbook was one of the most widely used reference works in the world: a yearly, country-by-country record of geography, people, government, economy and more. In February 2026 the CIA took it offline. The Factbook brings every edition back, from 1990 to 2025, so that record stays public and can be read, compared and cited.

36

editions, 1990 to 2025

288

countries and territories, including the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia

9,501

country entries

1,071,202

fields of text, under 282 headings

Four promises

  1. 01

    As published

    Each edition’s text exactly as the CIA published it. Nothing is smoothed, back-filled or silently corrected: where a figure looks odd, it is shown as that edition gave it.

  2. 02

    Provenance

    Every figure can be traced to the edition, the country and the field it came from, and every page can be cited.

  3. 03

    Only the layout is ours

    The words are the CIA’s, in the CIA’s order. Lists are set as lists, shares as bars, the latest of a series of figures large. Copying text from a page gives the text as it was published.

  4. 04

    Corrections logged

    Fixes to how the archive was collected, such as an entry filed under the wrong country, are listed in public with their reasons: 91 entries so far, on the corrections page.

Checked against the originals

The text is the CIA’s own, from each year’s edition of The World Factbook, a work of the United States Government and in the public domain. The archive is built from the open CIA World Factbooks Archive 1990–2025 project, which collected the original editions in three forms:

  • Plain text1990–1999, 2001From Project Gutenberg and the CIA
  • CIA web pages2000, 2002–2020The CIA’s downloadable editions, saved by the Internet Archive
  • CIA web data2021–2025Snapshots of the CIA’s website data

Before anything was published here, a sample of 200 fields from every edition was compared with those original files. Entries filed under the wrong country were moved (44), pages that held no Factbook text were left out (37), entries missing from the source were recovered from the original edition files (2), and the editions’ front matter was taken out of the entries it had been parsed into (8).

Read the corrections log

Matched word for word

99.96%

of the sampled fields. The rest are small formatting quirks in the source.

The Factbook is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency or the United States Government.

Data version 0.5.0, built 2026-10-20.