Fact · Accessibility and health
430 millionpeople
Over 5 percent of the world's population, or 430 million people, need rehabilitation for disabling hearing loss, including 34 million children.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“Over 5% of the world's population - or 430 million people - require rehabilitation to address their disabling hearing loss (including 34 million children).”
Deafness and hearing loss (fact sheet), World Health Organization, 2026, Overview.
Open the original- What it measures
- The WHO projects that by 2050 over 700 million people will have disabling hearing loss. For deaf and hard of hearing people, speech recognition is used the other way round, as live captions and transcription of what others say, and some deaf speakers find that recognizers struggle with their own speech.
- What it does not show
- A modelled global estimate based on WHO's threshold for disabling hearing loss. It does not say how many people use captions or speech-to-text.