Background: Refractive errors are the second most important cause of blindness and account for 18% of the burden. An estimated 123.7 million people suffer from visual impairment due to unaddressed refractive errors worldwide. International agencies recognize that globally, there is insufficient data on the prevalence and types of refractive errors in different populations and age groups. The present study evaluated the proportion of refractive errors with their clinico-demographic context among 10–24-year old patients, presenting to the Ophthalmology Outpatient Department (OPD) of a tertiary hospital of Bihar state of India.

Material and methods: This prospective, descriptive study collected information about refractive errors in 2739 eyes of 1482 young people. The association between the refractive errors and clinico-demographic variables such as age group, gender, residential background and educational status was evaluated using the chi-square test (taking p < 0.05 as significant).

Results: Hypermetropic errors were more common (51%) comprising of hypermetropia (32%) and hypermetropic astigmatism (19%). They marginally exceeded myopic errors (about 49%), comprising myopic astigmatism (26%) and myopia (22%) while mixed astigmatism was the least common (0.4%). Myopic errors were significantly more common in the 10–14 years age group (76%) while hypermetropic errors predominated in older age-groups (54%, p < 0.001). Myopia predominated in females (39%) and in rural young people (53%), myopic astigmatism in the illiterate (45%) but hypermetropia in males (37%, p < 0.001), urban (35%, p < 0.001) and literate young people (31%, p < 0.001).

Conclusions: This study revealed a broad picture of proportion and predominance of different refractive errors and their associations with clinico-demographic profile of the patients.