Annual Migration Flow Estimates by Sex between all Countries since 1960.

Global migration data are essential for understanding how human mobility shapes demographic, economic, social, and political dynamics worldwide. While migrant stock estimates remain a key resource, many research and policy applications benefit from data on migration flows, given their greater sensitivity to economic, political, and other changes. Inferring flows from stocks is not trivial, especially at a temporal resolution finer than the multi-year intervals of the stock data, which can be too coarse to capture migration responses to short-term events. Here, we present FLOW, a global dataset of bilateral migration flows, consistent with available migrant stock data, covering 1960-2024 at annual resolution. We first estimate multi-year flows by linking stock-derived variables to recent global flow observations, and applying the model to harmonised historical data. We then downscale the results to annual resolution by aligning them with country-level annual net migration. While subject to limitations and uncertainties inherent to this spatial and temporal scale, FLOW estimates provide a consistent and comprehensive resource for historical and forward-looking migration research, model development, and policy analysis, combining global coverage with annual resolution across more than six decades.