Method

Rules

1. Every figure has a source, a type of source and a reference date. If there is no reliable source, the page says so. It never guesses.
2. The site never uses a party's claims about the losses of the other side.
3. A total per side is only shown when its parts have the same type of source. Otherwise the parts are shown separately.
4. The parties appear in the alphabetical order of the language shown. There are no flags or symbols, and every war has the same design and the same colours.
5. Wars are named after places or after the parties, without qualification. Qualifications appear in the notes on method, with a source.
6. The counters show deaths from direct violence. Deaths from hunger, disease or lack of care are shown as context only, with an estimate and its source.
7. Which wars are listed follows from a fixed, public criterion, not from an editorial preference.

Which wars are listed

A war is listed when at least 1,000 people were killed in armed violence in the past twelve months, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED). This is the threshold the Uppsala Conflict Data Program uses for a war.

Only armed conflicts with a political aim count. ACLED also counts organised crime as political violence, but criminal violence is not listed here.

The list is checked every quarter. A war that stays below the threshold for two years moves to an archive: its page remains, the day counter stops.

All wars that meet the threshold are listed. Wars without an official count are shown with figures from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), which records deaths event by event in the same way for every war.

On the overview the wars are listed by the number of deaths in the past twelve months of UCDP data, the same measure for every war, so that the deadliest current wars come first. UCDP data run about six weeks behind; the period is shown above the list.

Types of source

Every figure carries one of these labels. Figures with different labels measure different things and are never added up.

Official

Reported by a government or public body of one of the parties to the war.

Verified by UN

Verified case by case by the United Nations. This is a minimum: the actual number is higher.

Confirmed by name

Documented person by person by independent journalists or researchers. This is a minimum: not every death is made public.

Monitor

Counted event by event by an independent research institute, from media reports and other sources.

Estimate

A statistical or scientific estimate. Shown as context only, never as a counter.

The counter on the overview

The counter estimates how many people have been killed today in the wars on this site. It uses the average number of deaths per day in the past twelve full months of data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, for all these wars together: 566 per day from September 2025 to August 2026. One source for all wars keeps the estimate consistent.

From midnight in the visitor's time zone the counter adds one death at random intervals that follow this average, as real events do. The sequence is fixed per day, so every visitor sees the same number at the same moment. The counter does not show actual deaths today: no source reports those in real time.

Updates

Figures from a daily source are updated automatically every day. Other figures are updated by hand when the source publishes new numbers. Every figure shows the date it refers to.

Languages

The site is available in English and in the languages of the countries where the listed wars take place. The overview and this page appear in all these languages; each war page appears in English and in the languages of the country or the parties. The translations were made with the help of software and are being checked by native speakers. Source titles keep their original language.

On your first visit to a page in English, the site may switch to the language of the country you are visiting from (based on your internet address) or to a language set in your browser. A notice at the top of the page says so and links back to English. The address is not stored. If you choose a language in the menu, the site remembers it for a year in a cookie named taal and uses it from then on. The site sets no other cookies.