Wild tigers live in just 10 countries today, scattered across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Russian Far East, and northeastern China. An estimated 5,700 tigers remain in the wild, occupying between 5% and 10% of their historical range. That range once stretched from Turkey to the Russian Pacific coast, but over the last 8,500 years, tigers have lost 90% to 95% of it.
The 10 Tiger Range Countries
The countries currently home to wild tigers are India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, and Russia. India holds the vast majority, with well over half the world’s wild tigers. At the other end of the spectrum, China’s wild population consists mostly of individuals that cross over from Russia, and Malaysia and Thailand hold small, fragmented groups.
Three countries that recently had tigers have lost them entirely in the last 20 years. Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam no longer have confirmed wild populations. These losses reflect a broader collapse across mainland Southeast Asia, where poaching and habitat destruction have hollowed out tiger numbers even inside protected areas.
Bengal Tigers: India and Its Neighbors
The Bengal tiger is the most numerous subspecies, found across the Indian subcontinent in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Within this range, tigers occupy a surprising variety of landscapes. In Nepal’s Terai Arc, they live in tropical deciduous forests, alluvial floodplain grasslands, and riverine corridors that also serve as wildlife highways connecting Nepalese and Indian tiger populations. In Bangladesh’s Sundarbans, they navigate mangrove swamps and tidal waterways.
India’s tiger reserves span everything from the dry deciduous forests of central India to the wet evergreen forests of the Western Ghats and the grassland mosaics of northern floodplains. Nepal distributes its tigers among five protected areas in the Terai and Churia foothills, with forest corridors in the lowlands providing critical connectivity to India’s larger population.
Amur Tigers: Russia’s Far East
The Amur tiger, sometimes called the Siberian tiger, is the northernmost subspecies. Over 95% of Amur tigers live in the Russian Far East, primarily in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains and the Primorye Krai region. These tigers endure harsh winters in coniferous-deciduous forests, a world apart from the tropical habitats of their southern relatives.
A small number of tigers cross into northeastern China’s Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces, but surveys have consistently found only a handful of individuals on the Chinese side, mostly along the Russian border. Researchers consider these largely dispersers from the Russian population rather than a self-sustaining group. Genetic studies have shown that the southwest Primorye population is already somewhat distinct from the main Sikhote-Alin population, though individual tigers do move between the two.
Indochinese and Malayan Tigers
The Indochinese tiger lives in mainland Southeast Asia, north of the Malayan Peninsula, with its remaining strongholds in Thailand and Myanmar. These populations are small and increasingly isolated. Myanmar’s political instability has made conservation monitoring difficult, and much of the subspecies’ former range in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is now empty.
The Malayan tiger occupies the southern Malayan Peninsula in Malaysia. It is one of the most critically threatened subspecies, with population estimates that have dropped sharply over the past two decades. Dense tropical rainforest is its primary habitat, but logging, road construction, and poaching have fragmented what remains.
Sumatran Tigers: The Last Island Subspecies
The Sumatran tiger is the only island tiger left. The Bali and Javan tigers both went extinct in the 20th century, making Sumatra’s population the last of its kind. These tigers are adapted to dense tropical rainforest and range from lowland areas near sea level up through hill, submontane, and montane forests above 2,000 meters.
The largest contiguous tiger habitat remaining on Sumatra is the Leuser Ecosystem, spanning 2.65 million hectares across the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra. At its core sits Gunung Leuser National Park, an 8,303-square-kilometer protected area that is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. Sumatran tigers have high metabolic demands and need expansive habitat with abundant prey, which makes the ongoing loss of lowland forest to palm oil plantations a direct threat to their survival.
What Habitats Tigers Need
Tigers are broadly tolerant of different environments, which is part of why they once ranged across such a vast area. What they consistently need is dense vegetation for cover, a reliable water source, and enough large prey animals to sustain them. Beyond that, they’ve adapted to a remarkable range of ecosystems: tropical rainforests in Sumatra, mangrove swamps in the Sundarbans, dry deciduous forests in central India, floodplain grasslands in Nepal, and snow-covered coniferous forests in Russia.
Research in Nepal’s Terai Arc has found tigers using mixed hardwood forest, sal forest, tall grassland, and riverine forest. Bengal tigers are primarily forest-dwelling, but they regularly use adjacent grasslands and wetlands for hunting. This flexibility means that conservation efforts focused only on dense forest miss part of the picture. The corridors between protected areas, often running through grasslands, riverine strips, and even degraded forest, are just as important for maintaining connected populations.
Range Loss and Reintroduction Efforts
Tigers historically roamed from eastern Turkey across Central Asia, through the Indian subcontinent, and into Southeast Asia, China, and the Russian Far East. That range has contracted by 90% to 95% over several thousand years, with the steepest losses occurring in the 20th century. The Caspian tiger, which once lived across Central Asia from Iran to western China, was declared extinct in the 1970s.
Kazakhstan is now working to reverse one piece of that loss. With support from the United Nations Development Programme, the country established the Ile-Balkhash State Nature Reserve in 2018 as a site for reintroducing tigers to Central Asia. The plan uses Amur tigers, the closest living relatives of the extinct Caspian tiger, as the founding population. The idea has been discussed for over a decade, and the Kazakh government formally backed it in 2010. If successful, it would mark the first time a country has restored wild tigers to a region where they were wiped out entirely.