The 193 member states of the United Nations
The United Nations has 193 member states. This reference lists each member with its year of admission and the informal UN regional group it belongs to, with a live search and region filter.
How it works
Each state carries an admission year — 1945 for the 51 founding members who
signed the Charter, and the actual year of admission for later joiners — and one
of five regional-group tags (African, Asia-Pacific, Eastern European, GRULAC, and
WEOG). These groups are not geographic in a strict sense; for example several
non-European states sit in WEOG. The filter narrows by group and the search box
matches on country name.
Who uses this and why
This reference is useful across several professional and academic contexts:
- Policy and legal researchers checking whether a specific state is a party to a UN treaty (treaty obligations attach at accession, so admission year context matters).
- Developers and data engineers building country-selection UIs or validation lists who need a canonical, complete dataset beyond ISO codes alone.
- Journalists and students verifying how long a country has been a member, or identifying which regional group it belongs to when reporting on UN voting or committee appointments.
- Compliance teams checking sanctions or trade control frameworks that reference UN member-state status.
The five regional groups — what they are and why they matter
The five informal regional groups were established in 1963 to allocate elected seats on UN bodies. They are not treaty-defined but are deeply embedded in UN practice:
| Group | Approximate membership |
|---|---|
| African Group | 54 member states |
| Asia-Pacific Group | 53 member states |
| Eastern European Group | 23 member states |
| GRULAC (Latin America & Caribbean) | 33 member states |
| WEOG (Western Europe & Others) | 28 member states + 2 observer states |
Note that the United States sits in WEOG, and Israel also joined WEOG in 2000 after many years without a regional-group home. The groups rotate for non-permanent seats on the Security Council, so knowing a country’s group is essential for tracking council composition.
Membership milestones
- 1945 — founding: 51 states signed the San Francisco Charter. Poland, which could not attend the conference due to political complications, signed later in 1945 and is counted among the original members, bringing the formal founding total to 51.
- 1960 — Year of Africa: 17 newly independent African nations joined in a single year, the largest single-year expansion.
- 1991 — post-Soviet wave: following the dissolution of the USSR, many successor and newly independent states joined between 1991 and 1993, growing membership rapidly.
- 2002 — Switzerland: notably joined only in 2002, as the country had long maintained a policy of non-membership to preserve neutrality; Timor-Leste also joined that year.
- 2011 — South Sudan: the newest member state, admitted following its independence referendum.
Observer entities such as the Holy See and the State of Palestine attend General Assembly sessions and participate in debates but do not vote and are not counted in the 193 total.