Roughly 30% of the world’s population is nearsighted, a condition where distant objects look blurry while close-up vision stays sharp. That translates to about 2.4 billion people alive today who need glasses, contacts, or surgery to see clearly at a distance. The number has been climbing steadily for decades, and projections suggest it will keep rising.
Global Numbers and How Fast They’re Growing
A comprehensive meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology put the current global prevalence of myopia (the medical term for nearsightedness) at 30.47%. That figure has been trending upward since at least 1990, when the pooled rate was closer to 24%. By 2023, it had climbed to nearly 36% among children and adolescents specifically.
The trajectory doesn’t show signs of leveling off. Researchers estimate the global caseload will reach roughly 600 million among young people by 2030, 665 million by 2040, and exceed 740 million by 2050. A widely cited projection from a 2016 study in the journal Ophthalmology goes even further: by 2050, about half the world’s population could be myopic. That’s nearly 5 billion people.
Where Rates Are Highest
Nearsightedness doesn’t affect every region equally. East Asia has the most dramatic numbers. Among young adults in countries like South Korea, China, and Singapore, 80 to 90% are nearsighted. In Western countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, rates sit between 20 and 40%.
The gap in severe cases is even more striking. High myopia, where the prescription is strong enough to raise the risk of serious eye disease, affects 6.8 to 21.6% of Asian populations compared to just 2 to 2.3% of non-Asian populations. These regional differences point to a mix of genetic susceptibility and lifestyle patterns, particularly how much time children spend indoors doing close-up work versus being outside.
Nearsightedness in the United States
In the U.S., the best available data comes from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Those figures show myopia affects roughly 43% of white Americans and 34% of Black Americans. A long-running county-level study found even higher numbers, with rates reaching 53% among white residents by the 2000s. By any measure, nearsightedness is the most common vision problem in the country, and prevalence has increased substantially since the 1970s.
Why Children Are Developing It Earlier
The surge in nearsightedness is largely driven by what’s happening in childhood. Eyes grow and change shape most rapidly before age 20, and this is when myopia typically develops. Data from China, where the trend has been most closely tracked, show that myopia prevalence among 15- to 19-year-olds now sits around 80% in some studies. Even among children aged 10 to 14, the rate is already substantial.
Two factors keep showing up in the research. First, children are spending far more time on close-up visual tasks: reading, screens, homework. Second, they’re spending less time outdoors. Population studies consistently show that children who spend two or more hours outside each day are significantly less likely to become nearsighted. Bright natural light appears to trigger the release of a chemical in the retina that helps the eye maintain its proper shape during growth. Researchers at Washington University recommend aiming for 60 to 120 minutes of outdoor time daily, ideally during late morning to mid-afternoon when ambient light is strongest.
This helps explain the regional differences. In many East Asian countries, academic pressure keeps children indoors for long hours from a young age, while outdoor play time has shrunk. Countries that have actively encouraged outdoor time in schools, like Taiwan and Singapore, have started to see their childhood myopia rates stabilize.
When Nearsightedness Becomes a Health Risk
Mild nearsightedness is mostly an inconvenience, easily corrected with glasses or contacts. High myopia is a different story. Defined as a prescription of roughly negative 6 diopters or stronger, high myopia stretches the eyeball enough to damage internal structures over time. It significantly raises the risk of cataracts, glaucoma, retinal detachment, and a condition called myopic macular degeneration, where the light-sensing tissue at the back of the eye breaks down. In Japan, myopic macular degeneration alone accounts for 12.2% of all vision impairment.
Globally, about 2.7% of the population had high myopia in 2000. That’s projected to nearly quadruple to 9.8% by 2050, which would mean close to a billion people living with a meaningful risk of irreversible vision loss. Among Chinese teenagers aged 15 to 19, 9.5% already have high myopia. The concern isn’t just that more people need glasses. It’s that the severity of prescriptions is increasing, and the eye complications that follow tend to show up in middle age, decades after the damage begins.
What’s Driving the Global Increase
Genetics plays a role. If both your parents are nearsighted, your risk is substantially higher. But genes don’t change fast enough to explain a doubling in prevalence over a few decades. The acceleration is environmental. Urbanization, more years of formal education, rising screen time, and less outdoor play have all converged. Countries that urbanized rapidly in the last 30 years, particularly in East and Southeast Asia, saw the sharpest increases.
The pattern holds across ethnic groups. When populations with historically low myopia rates adopt urban, education-intensive lifestyles, their rates climb too. This suggests the epidemic is less about who you are and more about how you live, especially during the years when your eyes are still developing.