The taxonomy and nomenclature of living organisms is constantly changing with our knowledge of the particular taxonomic groups and their systematics. So we have to acknowledge that any static checklist is just a snapshot of our knowledge, and will be out of date pretty soon.
We built a preliminary, working global checklist to use as a reference for our work, but want to emphasize that we are summarizing data as provided by several authors with different levels of taxonomic expertise, and who might have different approaches to deal with taxonomic problematic species or species groups. Some regions are better explored than others and some taxonomic groups are better studied than others.
Sources used and totals per region/family
Neotropical Checklist by Lamas, first published in 2004, available in electronic format from taxome, but also accesible through TABDP, Butterflies of America: 30305 names, 957 genera and 7787 species.
How many species are there in the world?
Estimates from different authors... and our compiled list
Details of totals
More species rich genera, tribes, subfamilies...