How many people live in the United States?

How to get close to this number

Rank it against the two above it. India and China are both around one and a half billion, and this country is third but at less than a quarter of either. That is a much larger gap than most people assume — third place here is not close to second, and the distribution of national populations is extremely top-heavy.

The growth composition is the same story as Spain and Japan on this site: fertility has been below replacement since 2007, so population growth depends almost entirely on immigration. Nearly every wealthy country is now in this position, and the differences between them are differences in migration policy rather than in birth rates.

Note what the figure counts: resident population as estimated by a statistical agency between censuses, which involves modelling births, deaths and migration rather than counting people. Inter-census estimates are revised when the next census arrives, sometimes substantially, so a population figure for a non-census year is a projection wearing the clothes of a measurement.