How Many Species of Hummingbirds Are There?

There are 366 species of hummingbirds, according to version 15.2 of the IOC World Bird List, the checklist maintained by the International Ornithologists' Union. They are spread across 112 genera in a single family, Trochilidae, which makes hummingbirds one of the largest bird families on Earth.

That number is not the only defensible one. Different global checklists split and lump species differently, and the current published totals range from about 338 to 373. If you want a single figure to quote, 366 is the one most widely used right now, but it is worth knowing why it moves.

Which authority says what

Global bird taxonomy has historically been maintained by several competing organisations, each with its own rules about when two populations count as separate species. Their hummingbird totals differ accordingly.

| Checklist | Hummingbird species | | ----------------------------------- | ------------------- | | IOC World Bird List v15.2 | 366 | | HBW / BirdLife International (2025) | ~373 | | AviList (2025) | ~363 | | eBird/Clements (2025) | ~363 | | Howard and Moore 4.1 (2014) | ~338 |

The older Howard and Moore figure is low mostly because it is old: a decade of genetic work has since split populations that were previously treated as single species. The spread among the current lists — roughly ten species — reflects live disagreement rather than anyone being wrong.

This situation is changing. In June 2025 a unified global checklist called AviList was published, merging the IOC, Clements and BirdLife taxonomies into one list of 11,131 species. The organisations behind the three older lists have committed to converging on it, so the era of three competing bird taxonomies is ending.

What counts as a hummingbird

All hummingbirds belong to the family Trochilidae, and all of them live in the Americas. There are no wild hummingbirds in Europe, Africa, Asia or Australia. The family runs from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, but diversity is heavily concentrated near the equator — Ecuador and Colombia each host well over a hundred species.

Molecular work has reorganised the family into nine main clades:

• Topazes and jacobins (Florisuginae)
• Hermits (Phaethornithinae)
• Mangoes (Polytminae)
• Coquettes (Lesbiini)
• Brilliants (Heliantheini)
• The giant hummingbird (Patagoninae)
• Mountaingems (Lampornithini)
• Bees (Mellisugini)
• Emeralds (Trochilini)

The giant hummingbird gets a branch to itself because it sits alone on a long, early-diverging lineage. If you want to see how they compare with the rest of the class, our random bird generator pulls species from across all bird families, hummingbirds included.

The size range

The bee hummingbird of Cuba is about 5 cm long and weighs under 2 grams, which makes it the smallest bird in the world. The giant hummingbird of the Andes reaches 23 cm and 17–31 grams. That is roughly a fifteen-fold difference in mass inside one family.

Wingbeat rates scale inversely with size. The giant hummingbird manages around 12 beats per second; small species reach 99. Heart rates in the family have been recorded as high as 1,260 beats per minute. To survive cold nights on that metabolism, many species enter torpor, dropping their metabolic rate to about a fifteenth of normal.

Why the count keeps changing

Two forces push in opposite directions. Genetic sequencing keeps revealing that populations which look alike are reproductively separate, which raises the count. Occasionally the reverse happens and two named species turn out to be one, which lowers it.

The giant hummingbird is a good recent example. A 2024 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that what had been treated as one species is really two, separated for roughly two to three million years. One population is resident in the high Andes; the other migrates to extreme elevations and back. They look nearly identical. The proposed names were northern and southern giant hummingbird, and the naming has since been complicated by an older description from 1893 that has priority.

Splits like this are why a checklist published in 2014 and one published in 2026 can differ by nearly thirty species without either being sloppy.

Extinctions and threatened species

Only one hummingbird in the IOC list is marked extinct: Brace's emerald, known from the Bahamas and last collected in the nineteenth century. That is a remarkably low figure for a family this large, though it partly reflects how hard extinction is to confirm in small tropical birds.

Living hummingbirds are not doing as well. IUCN Red List assessments place 8 species as critically endangered, 13 as endangered and 13 as vulnerable, with a further 22 near-threatened. Most of the species at risk have tiny ranges — a single mountain, a single valley — which is a direct consequence of the same geographic isolation that produced so many species in the first place.

The short version

If someone asks how many hummingbird species there are, 366 is a good answer, and "somewhere between 360 and 375, depending on whose list you use" is a better one. The family is large, concentrated in the American tropics, and still being actively revised.

For a broader sample of what else is out there, the random animal generator covers birds alongside mammals, reptiles, fish and insects.