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.

What is the Human Development Index Reference?

Searchable reference of UNDP Human Development Index values from 0 to 1 with the official development tier for each country, sortable from Switzerland and Norway at the top down. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Human Development Index Reference

Name: Human Development Index Reference
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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.

What the three sub-indices actually measure

Understanding the components helps interpret differences between countries:

Life expectancy index — based on life expectancy at birth, normalized between a minimum of 20 years and a maximum of 85 years. A country with a life expectancy of 72 years sits at roughly 0.76 on this sub-index.
Education index — the geometric mean of two schooling measures: mean years of schooling for adults aged 25 and older, and expected years of schooling for children currently entering school. Minimum values are 0 in both cases; the maxima used by UNDP are 18 years for expected schooling and 15 years for mean schooling.
Income index — gross national income (GNI) per capita at purchasing power parity, transformed with a natural logarithm to reflect diminishing returns to income. The logarithm matters: doubling income from $1,000 to $2,000 has a larger human impact than doubling from $50,000 to $100,000.

The three sub-indices are combined as a geometric mean rather than an arithmetic average, which means a very low score in any one dimension drags the overall HDI down significantly. A country cannot fully compensate for, say, very short life expectancy with high income alone.

Where HDI diverges from GDP rankings

The most instructive use of this table is comparing a country’s HDI rank with its income rank. Countries where HDI rank exceeds income rank have managed to translate relatively modest resources into strong health and education outcomes. Countries where income rank exceeds HDI rank have high GDP per capita but less investment in human development relative to peers.

Several oil-exporting economies and some fast-growing developing countries show visible gaps between income and HDI, while certain low-income countries with strong community health systems and high literacy punch above their economic weight.

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.
HDI is published annually with a lag; the figures here reflect a recent UNDP Human Development Report and may differ slightly from the latest release.