Liban or Lebanon? Basic Facts About the Country, Akkar and Its Economy

Liban and Lebanon are the same country: Liban is its name in French, Lebanon in English and Lubnān (لبنان) in Arabic. It is a small Arab country in the Middle East, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, with Beirut as its capital.

This page answers the basic questions people ask about it: where Lebanon is, whether it is an Arab and Middle Eastern country, how big it is, what its people are called, where Akkar is, and what can honestly be said about the average salary in Lebanon since the economic collapse that began in 2019.

Liban, Lebanon, Lubnān: the name

The official name is the Lebanese Republic, in Arabic al-Jumhūrīyah al-Lubnānīyah. According to the CIA World Factbook, the name comes from the Semitic root lbn, meaning white, and probably refers to the snow on the country's mountains.

The French form, Liban, is still widely used because France administered the country under a League of Nations mandate until independence in 1943. French remains one of Lebanon's everyday languages and Lebanon belongs to the International Organisation of La Francophonie, so the name appears as Liban on many signs, documents and products.

The people are Lebanese, a word often misspelled as Lebenese or Lebaonese. In Arabic the adjective is Lubnānī, and in French libanais.

Where is Lebanon?

Lebanon lies at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. The Factbook gives its location as the Middle East, bordering the Mediterranean between Israel and Syria. It has 225 kilometers of coastline, a 403-kilometer border with Syria to the north and east, and an 81-kilometer border with Israel to the south.

Two mountain ranges run the length of the country, parallel to the coast, with the Beqaa valley between them. Most people live on or near the coast, especially in and around Beirut.

Is Lebanon an Arab country? Is it in the Middle East?

Yes to both. Lebanon is a member of the League of Arab States, Arabic is its official language, and the CIA World Factbook describes its population as 95 percent Arab. Geographically it sits in the part of western Asia usually called the Middle East, or the Levant; the Factbook notes that it is the smallest country in continental Asia.

So Lebanese people are Middle Eastern, and most are Arab. Identity is more layered than those labels suggest: Lebanon has a long-established Armenian community, and some Lebanese Christians prefer to describe themselves as Phoenician in origin. Our guide to Lebanon's people and religions covers ethnicity, the 18 recognized sects and the governorates in detail.

Lebanon at a glance

Lebanon has not held a census since 1932, so every population figure is an estimate, and estimates differ mainly in how they count refugees.

• Capital: Beirut, on the Mediterranean coast.
• Area: 10,400 square kilometers according to the CIA World Factbook, about one-third the size of the US state of Maryland. Lebanese and European Union sources often give 10,452 square kilometers.
• Population: about 5.8 million in 2025 according to the World Bank's data, which uses UN estimates. The CIA World Factbook's 2024 estimate was lower, at 5.36 million.
• Languages: Arabic is the official language. French, English and Armenian are also spoken.
• Currency: the Lebanese pound (LBP), also called the lira.
• Government: a parliamentary republic in which the top offices are shared among religious communities.

Akkar: Lebanon's northernmost governorate

Akkar is the governorate at the northern tip of Lebanon, between the Mediterranean and the Syrian border. Its administrative center is the town of Halba. The European Union Agency for Asylum puts its population at about 450,000 and describes it as mainly Sunni Muslim and Christian (Maronite and Orthodox), with smaller Alawite and Shia communities.

Akkar is in the news for two connected reasons. The first is poverty. A UN OCHA profile from 2018 called it the poorest of Lebanon's governorates, and a World Bank poverty assessment published in May 2024 found that poverty reached as high as 70 percent in Akkar in 2022, against 44 percent for the country as a whole. OCHA describes the area outside Tripoli as primarily agricultural, with both residents and refugees relying heavily on unskilled and irregular work.

The second is refugees. OCHA notes that Akkar shares a border of about 100 kilometers with Syria, and that the war in Syria brought large numbers of refugees into an area that already had weak roads, water and electricity networks. Its Akkar profile of June 2019 counted 428,600 people living in the governorate, of whom an estimated 152,000, more than a third, were Syrian refugees.

Lebanon's economy since 2019

In late 2019 Lebanon's banking system and currency collapsed together. The World Bank says the Lebanese pound has lost 98 percent of its value since then and that the crisis pushed more than a third of the population into poverty. The official rate was 1,507.5 pounds to the US dollar when the crisis began; the Factbook lists the rate at 89,500 to the dollar in 2024.

The economy shrank with it. World Bank data put Lebanon's gross domestic product at about $55 billion in 2018, $20 billion in 2023 and $26 billion in 2024. Its poverty assessment found that 44 percent of the population was poor in 2022, more than three times the rate a decade earlier.

Conflict has added to the damage. A World Bank assessment put the economic cost of the 2023-24 conflict in Lebanon at $14 billion, and its Lebanon Economic Monitor of summer 2026 projected that the economy would contract by 6.4 percent in 2026, after renewed conflict reversed a fragile recovery in 2025.

What is the average salary in Lebanon?

There is no single reliable, current figure, and any website that offers one should say where it comes from. The last official survey was carried out in January 2022 by Lebanon's Central Administration of Statistics with the International Labour Organization (ILO). It found that employees earned on average about 2,284,100 Lebanese pounds a month at their main job, with a median of 1,600,000 pounds.

Those numbers show how far wages fell in dollar terms. In the previous survey, in 2018-19, the average was about 1,179,900 pounds, worth roughly $780 at the official rate of the time. By January 2022 the market rate used by the survey was 25,000 pounds to the dollar, which made the new, nominally higher average worth about $90 a month and the median about $64. The same survey put unemployment at 29.6 percent, up from 11.4 percent.

Pay has changed again since, and the survey itself noted that some people were paid in dollars while most were paid in pounds, which makes any single average misleading. The legal minimum wage in the private sector was raised from 18 million to 28 million pounds a month from August 1, 2025, according to WageIndicator, which is about $313 at 89,500 pounds to the dollar. Averages also hide wide differences. In the 2022 survey, employees with a university education earned about 3.8 million pounds a month on average, and those with secondary education about 2.1 million.

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon

Lebanon's crisis falls hardest on people who had the least to begin with, and that includes Palestinian refugees, who have lived in the country since 1948 without citizenship. Our guide to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon explains their numbers, the camps and their legal position.

Fight for Palestine does not work in Lebanon. We fund emergency aid for Palestinian families in Gaza through local partner teams; you can read about Gaza humanitarian aid or donate if you want to help there.