HIV Prevalence Rate
HIV Prevalence Rate by country
Commentary
Notable countries
The lowest reported HIV prevalence rates are clustered at 0.05% in Andorra, Brunei, Cyprus, Japan, South Korea, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and Taiwan, with Afghanistan next at 0.1%. At the other end, the highest rates are all in Africa, led by Eswatini at 23.4%, followed by South Africa at 17.2% and Lesotho at 17.1%. A striking feature of the data is how tightly the best-performing countries are grouped near zero, while the highest-prevalence countries are far above the global mean of 1.183%.
Regional trends
Africa stands out with by far the highest continental average at 3.222%, well above every other region. Europe and Asia have the lowest averages, at 0.2278% and 0.2043% respectively, while Oceania (0.4714%), South America (0.6917%), and North America (0.6957%) sit in the middle but remain below 1%. This points to a strong regional concentration of higher HIV prevalence in Africa compared with relatively low levels elsewhere.
Data source
The figures come from UNAIDS 2024 and are measured as the percentage of adults aged 15-49 living with HIV. The dataset covers 187 countries. A caveat is that these are prevalence rates, so they show how widespread HIV is in the adult population rather than the number of new infections.
Interpretation
Because lower is better, high values indicate a larger share of adults aged 15-49 living with HIV, while low values indicate much lower prevalence in that population. The wide gap between Africa’s average and all other regional averages shows that the global burden is very unevenly distributed. At the same time, most regions have averages below 1%, so the global mean is pulled upward by a relatively small group of very high-prevalence countries.