The World Factbook

Copyright

As a work of the US government, the Factbook is in the public domain and can be redistributed in part or in whole without need for permission, although the CIA requested that the Factbook be cited if used. Copying the official seal of the CIA without permission is prohibited by the US federal Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 (50 U.S.C. § 403m).

Frequency of updates and availability

Before November 2001, The World Factbook website was updated yearly; from 2004 to 2010 it was updated every two weeks; From 2010 to 2026 it was updated weekly. Generally, information available as of January 1 of the current year was used in preparing the Factbook. Following efforts by CIA director John Ratcliffe to "end programs that don't advance the agency's core missions", the Factbook was discontinued on February 4, 2026, with all pages on its website made inaccessible. No reason was given for the discontinuation.

Government edition

The first classified edition of Factbook was published in August 1962, and the first unclassified version in June 1971. The World Factbook was first available to the public in print in 1975. Until 2008 the CIA printed the Factbook; from then until its discontinuation it was printed by the Government Printing Office following a CIA decision to "focus Factbook resources" on the online edition. In 2017, the printed book was officially discontinued. The Factbook was made available via the World Wide Web beginning October 1994, receiving about six million visits per month in 2006; it was also available for download. The official printed version was sold by the Government Printing Office and National Technical Information Service. In past years, the Factbook was available on CD-ROM, microfiche, magnetic tape, and floppy disk.

Reprints and older editions online

Many Internet sites use information and images from the CIA World Factbook. Several publishers, including Grand River Books, Potomac Books (formerly known as Brassey's Inc.), and Skyhorse Publishing have published the Factbook in recent years. Older editions since 2000 were available for download (but not browsing) from the Factbook website until 2026 and can be found in print or online archives.

Discontinuation

Without previous warning, on February 4, 2026 the project's URL was redirected to a page announcing that The World Factbook had been discontinued. No explanation was given, and the CIA refused to comment on the record. All versions were removed from the CIA's website immediately, disrupting academic uses such as by the Boston University Questrom School of Business, which was using it for open-book tests. The Mozilla Data Collective has since published a dataset that includes the 260 world entities listed in the Factbook, capturing "the final state of the public data (Jan 23, 2026) before the official website was retired." There is also another website called "Factbook Archive" that contains the information of The World Factbook from 1990 to 2025. A group of volunteers subsequently launched OpenFactBook, a community-maintained website intended as a successor to the Factbook, with much of the same underlying information.

The news channel CNN linked the discontinuation to other restrictions and closures of government-funded information websites under the second Trump administration, including closure of health sites, and restrictions on the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service.

Entities listed

As of July 2011, The World Factbook comprised 266 entities, which can be divided into the following categories:

Independent countries

The CIA defines these as people "politically organized into a sovereign state with a definite territory." In this category, there are 195 entities.

Others

Places set apart from the list of independent countries. There are two of these: Taiwan and the European Union.

Dependencies and Areas of Special Sovereignty

Places affiliated with another country. They may be subcategorized by affiliated country:

• Australia: 6 entities
• China: 2 entities
• Denmark: 2 entities
• France: 8 entities
• Netherlands: 3 entities
• New Zealand: 3 entities
• Norway: 3 entities
• United Kingdom: 17 entities
• United States: 14 entities

Miscellaneous

Antarctica and places in dispute. There are six such entities.

Other entities

The World and the oceans. There are five oceans and the World (the World entry is intended as a summary of the other entries).

Reception

Reference Reviews reviewed the online edition of The World Factbook in 2016, praising its "up-to-date facts and figures" through its weekly updates while expressing concern over its usability due to difficult content navigation and inadequate font sizes.

The Factbook has been criticized for serving the interests of the United States by controlling the manner in which other countries are represented and for adopting, at least in some cases, an ahistorical perspective.