TOP 10 Countries by Adult Literacy Rate (2025)
Why “almost universal” adult literacy still hides important gaps
In the leading countries of the world, more than 99 percent of adults report that they can read and write. On paper, the problem of basic literacy looks almost solved. Yet even a fraction of a percentage point represents thousands of people, and behind the clean headline numbers lie differences in age, region, language background and the depth of skills. This section looks at the ten countries at the very top of the adult-literacy ranking and explores how they got there, what progress they have made since 1990, and where challenges remain.
Table 1. Adult literacy rate (% of population 15+, both sexes), Top 10 countries, 2025
| Rank | Country | Adult literacy rate, % |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Estonia | 99.9 |
| 2 | Poland | 99.8 |
| 3 | Czechia | 99.8 |
| 4 | Latvia | 99.8 |
| 5 | Singapore | 99.8 |
| 6 | South Korea | 99.7 |
| 7 | Slovenia | 99.7 |
| 8 | Japan | 99.7 |
| 9 | Finland | 99.6 |
| 10 | Germany | 99.5 |
The numerical differences in Table 1 are small, but they are not meaningless. In a country with 50 million adults, a gap of 0.4 percentage points between 99.5 and 99.9 percent translates into roughly 200 thousand people who still have very limited reading and writing skills. In most cases these adults are older, poorer and more isolated than the average citizen.
The group of top performers is diverse. It includes Nordic and Central European economies with long-standing traditions of mass education, East Asian “education powerhouses” such as South Korea and Singapore, and newer members of the European Union like Estonia and Latvia that used education reforms as a lever for rapid economic modernisation.
Chart 1. Adult literacy rate in Top 10 countries, 2025
The bar chart below zooms into the narrow interval between 99.5 and 100 percent. Each bar highlights the “last mile” of literacy — the remaining group of adults who may still struggle with basic text, and who are often concentrated in older age cohorts, rural areas or marginalised communities.
From expansion to consolidation: how the Top 10 reached near-universal literacy
The countries in the Top 10 did not arrive at near-universal literacy overnight. Their trajectories since 1990 share several common stages. First, all of them completed the historical transition to universal primary education, usually by the late 1980s or early 1990s. Exclusion from schooling did not disappear altogether, but it no longer affected large cohorts of children.
Second, these systems invested heavily in the quality of compulsory schooling. Reforms focused on teacher qualifications, early-grade reading programmes and better learning materials. In the Baltic states, for example, the upheavals of the early 1990s were accompanied by ambitious curriculum changes and new textbooks. In East Asia, South Korea and Singapore linked basic literacy to wider human-capital strategies that supported industrial upgrading and export-led growth.
Third, the countries that pushed adult literacy above 99 percent shifted their policy focus from access to equity. As younger generations achieved high completion rates, the remaining literacy gaps became concentrated in specific groups: older adults who had left school early, rural communities where schooling expanded late, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities. Governments responded with targeted second-chance programmes, adult basic education courses and flexible learning pathways that combine remedial literacy with vocational skills. In numerical terms these interventions affected relatively small numbers of people, but they made the difference between a system stuck at 97–98 percent and one that approaches 100 percent.
Table 2. Adult literacy in Top 10 countries, 1990 vs 2025
For most of the Top 10, the largest literacy expansion happened before 1990. Since then, progress has been incremental but still meaningful, especially in countries that began the period with a larger share of adults who had not completed primary school.
| Country | 1990, % | 2025, % |
|---|---|---|
| Estonia | 98.5 | 99.9 |
| Poland | 98.0 | 99.8 |
| Czechia | 99.0 | 99.8 |
| Latvia | 98.7 | 99.8 |
| Singapore | 90.0 | 99.8 |
| South Korea | 96.5 | 99.7 |
| Slovenia | 97.8 | 99.7 |
| Japan | 99.0 | 99.7 |
| Finland | 99.0 | 99.6 |
| Germany | 99.0 | 99.5 |
The Baltic states and Singapore stand out as examples of rapid progress among adults. In these countries, younger cohorts with high completion rates gradually replaced older cohorts who had limited formal schooling, while adult-learning programmes helped some older residents acquire basic skills later in life.
In Finland, Japan and Germany the headline rate was already very high by 1990. Their policy challenge over the last three decades has not been to raise the average, but to prevent deterioration among vulnerable groups: low-skilled workers affected by labour-market change, migrants who may not have completed schooling in their country of origin, and older adults at risk of losing skills through lack of practice.
Inside “universal” systems: generational, social and regional gaps
Aggregate adult-literacy rates can easily hide large differences within a country. In a typical high-income system with a reported literacy rate of 99 percent, the skills of 20-year-olds and 70-year-olds may look very different. Young adults usually benefit from longer schooling, better-trained teachers and more exposure to written materials and digital text. Some older adults, by contrast, rely on memorised routines rather than flexible reading and writing skills.
Social disparities also remain. In several of the Top 10 countries, assessments of adult skills show that people from low-educated or low-income families are over-represented among those who perform at the lowest literacy levels. Migrant populations may face additional barriers related to language, recognition of qualifications and access to adult-learning opportunities. These pockets of vulnerability rarely move the national average by more than a fraction of a percentage point, but they matter greatly from the standpoint of social inclusion and economic resilience.
A further caveat is that conventional indicators classify people as either “literate” or “illiterate” based on simple self-reported questions or very basic tests. They do not distinguish between someone who can slowly decode short words and someone who can read, evaluate and synthesise complex information. For policy, this means that high adult-literacy rates should always be interpreted together with richer assessments of learning outcomes and adult skills.
Convergence from below: developing countries catching up
The global story of adult literacy since 1990 is not only about consolidation at the top. It is also about convergence from below, as many middle-income and lower-middle-income countries have rapidly expanded schooling and reduced the share of adults who cannot read or write. While these countries do not yet appear in the Top 10 ranking, their progress is critical for understanding global trends.
The line chart below illustrates this convergence for three large developing countries — Brazil, Turkey and Bangladesh — compared with Germany as a reference high-income country. In 1990, each of the three had a sizable literacy gap relative to Germany. By 2025 that gap has narrowed substantially, even though full convergence has not yet been achieved. The steepest improvements are typically observed in younger age cohorts and rural areas where school access has expanded most rapidly.
Chart 2. Adult literacy convergence, selected developing countries vs Germany, 1990–2025
Each line represents the estimated adult literacy rate in a given year. The upward slopes for Brazil, Turkey and Bangladesh show how sustained investment in basic education can compress long-standing gaps within a single generation, even when starting from relatively low initial levels.
The unfinished agenda: where adult literacy still lags behind
The existence of a Top 10 with literacy above 99 percent should not obscure the fact that, worldwide, tens of millions of adults remain unable to read even simple text. The majority live in low-income countries and in fragile or conflict-affected settings. In some of these contexts, adult-literacy rates are still below 70 percent, and progress over the past three decades has been slow or uneven.
Common risk factors include persistent poverty, large distances to schools, gender norms that restrict girls’ education, and language barriers where schooling is offered in a language not spoken at home. Adult-learning programmes can mitigate these disadvantages for current generations of adults, but their impact tends to be highly localised and dependent on sustained funding and community support.
For policymakers and analysts, the contrast between countries that have almost closed the literacy gap and those that still face large deficits underlines three strategic priorities:
- protecting basic-education budgets, especially during periods of fiscal stress;
- targeting the most disadvantaged communities with flexible, context-sensitive adult-literacy initiatives; and
- integrating literacy with broader skills agendas, including digital skills, numeracy and problem-solving, rather than treating literacy as an isolated goal.
How to read the numbers: definitions, limitations and complementary indicators
Adult-literacy statistics in international databases are usually derived from national censuses, large-scale household surveys or labour-force surveys. Respondents are classified as literate if they report that they can both read and write a short, simple statement about their everyday life, or if they demonstrate this ability in a very basic test. This definition captures essential skills, but it does not measure reading speed, comprehension depth or the ability to work with digital text and documents.
Differences in measurement instruments and reference years mean that cross-country comparisons should be interpreted with care. For example, a country whose latest literacy data come from a census conducted in 2012 may appear to lag behind a neighbour with a 2021 household survey, even if underlying progress has been similar. Small discrepancies between national statistics and harmonised international series also arise from the way age groups are aggregated and how missing data are treated.
To obtain a fuller picture of skills, adult-literacy rates are best viewed alongside complementary indicators: learning-outcome assessments at the end of primary and lower-secondary schooling, international surveys of adult skills, and measures of participation in adult-learning and training. In combination, these datasets help distinguish between systems where adults can just meet basic literacy thresholds and those where a large share of the population can engage confidently with complex written information.
Primary data sources for this overview
The figures and trends discussed in this section are based on harmonised international datasets that compile national statistics on adult literacy. While the precise rankings may change slightly as new data become available, the underlying picture of near-universal literacy in the Top 10 countries — and rapid convergence in many middle-income countries — is robust across recent data releases.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators. Indicator “SE.ADT.LITR.ZS: Literacy rate, adult total (% of people ages 15 and above)”. Accessible via the DataBank interface: https://databank.worldbank.org.
- UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). Education database, literacy indicators for youth and adults, disaggregated by sex and age group. Available through: https://uis.unesco.org.
Adult literacy Top 10: tables and charts (ZIP)
Archive with source tables (Excel workbook) and ready-to-use PNG charts for the article on Top 10 countries by adult literacy rate in 2025.
