What Is Population Variance?
Population variance, written σ², describes the spread of a group when you have measured every member of it. There is nothing to estimate, so you take the average of the squared deviations from the mean exactly as it is: divide by N, the number of values. Typical examples are the marks of every student in one class, the weight of every parcel in a single shipment you weighed in full, or one company's monthly sales for a completed year. The key question is not how big your data set is, but whether it is the whole group you want to describe.