Headquarters Timergara · Malakand Division · 1,650,183 people in 2023 · only about 3 percent urban
Lower Dir District is one of the 38 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with its headquarters at Timergara. It has 4 sub-divisions: Adenzai, Lal Qila, Samarbagh and Temergara. The 2023 census counted 1,650,183 people on 1,583 km², and 57.36% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adenzai | Sub-division | 378,915 | 372 | – | 62.19% |
| Lal Qila | Sub-division | 247,381 | 216 | – | 53.29% |
| Samarbagh | Sub-division | 427,714 | 419 | – | 45.75% |
| Temergara | Sub-division | 596,173 | 576 | 8.03% | 64.06% |
Lower Dir is the crowded down-valley of the old Dir state. Timergara is the headquarters. Swat is east, Bajaur and Malakand south, Upper Dir north, Afghanistan west. The 2023 census found more women than men here (about 837,000 women, 814,000 men). That is the opposite of Khyber or Bannu. That figure is not a typing error.
Pashto is the mother tongue of about 1.64 million of 1.65 million people. In January 2023 the province notified a Central Dir district cut from Upper and Lower Dir. Some tehsil names that still appear on Lower Dir lists (Balambat, Khal, Munda) may move when PBS prints two separate books. This page follows the 2023 rows that are already public.
Households 202,836. Population 1,650,183. Urban only about 48,000. Rural about 1.60 million. Literacy 57.36 percent — 72.57 percent for men, 43.16 percent for women. Under-tens about 542,000 (33 percent). Density on the district figure is above 1,000 people per km² — a village density, not a mountain emptiness.
Timergara — 576 km², 596,173 people, literacy about 64 percent. Headquarters. Highest literacy of the printed four. DHQ Timergara sits here.
Samar Bagh (Samarbagh / Barwa) — 419 km², 427,714 people, literacy about 45.8 percent. Second-largest count. Lowest literacy of the four printed rows.
Adenzai — 372 km², 378,915 people, literacy about 62.2 percent. Chakdara side toward the Swat road is the name drivers already use.
Lal Qilla — 216 km², 247,381 people, about 1,145 per km², literacy about 53.3 percent. Smallest area of the four, very dense.
Balambat, Khal and Munda are extra tehsil titles on some maps. No complete 2023 population line for them is in the same extract. They are named here without totals.
University of Dir / Timergara campuses and government colleges are the degree names. Students also go to Chakdara and to Peshawar. DHQ Timergara is the referral hospital for this valley. Type-D / THQ lists include Samar Bagh and Lal Qilla. Female literacy at 43 percent is better than Bajaur; it is still the reason a girls’ college in Samar Bagh matters more on this page than a scenic paragraph.
Sources: PBS 2023 district compilation; tehsil literacy rows for Timergara, Adenzai, Samar Bagh and Lal Qilla; KP notification on Central Dir, January 2023. September 2026.
Lower Dir District has 4 sub-divisions: Adenzai, Lal Qila, Samarbagh and Temergara.
The 2023 census counted 1,650,183 people in Lower Dir District, up from 1,436,082 in 2017 (annual growth 2.35%). 2.9% of the population lived in urban areas.
Lower Dir District covers 1,583 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 1,042.44 people per km².
57.36% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 72.57%, female 43.16%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Pashto (99.54% of the 1,648,620 people in the mother-tongue table).
Lower Dir District is in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Its headquarters is Timergara.