You’ve seen the map overlays on social media. Someone takes a bright red outline of Australia and plops it right on top of the United States. They look almost like twins. "Wow," people comment, "I had no idea Australia was that huge."
But then you look at a different source, and it tells you the US is the third or fourth largest country on Earth, while Australia is sitting down at number six. So, what’s the deal? Honestly, it depends entirely on which "America" you’re talking about and whether you’re counting the water between the land.
Is Australia Bigger Than America? The Quick Answer
Basically, if you’re looking at the entire United States—including the massive wildness of Alaska and the islands of Hawaii—then no, Australia is not bigger.
The United States covers about 9.8 million square kilometers.
Australia covers roughly 7.7 million square kilometers.
That’s a pretty significant gap. We’re talking about a 20% to 25% difference in total area. However, the reason people get so confused is because of the "Lower 48." If you compare Australia to just the contiguous United States (the states that actually touch each other), the two are almost identical in size. In fact, Australia is actually a tiny bit larger than the contiguous US.
The Numbers That Matter
Let’s look at the real stats for 2026. According to geographical data from the CIA World Factbook and Geoscience Australia, the breakdown looks like this:
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- Total US Area: ~9,833,517 $km^2$ (This includes land, inland water, and territorial waters).
- Total Australia Area: ~7,692,024 $km^2$.
- Contiguous US (Lower 48): ~8,080,464 $km^2$.
If you strip away the water and just look at the land area, the US still wins at about 9.1 million $km^2$ compared to Australia's 7.6 million $km^2$.
The Map Problem: Why We All Get Fooled
Map projections are kind of a mess. Most of us grew up looking at the Mercator projection in school. It’s that standard flat map where Greenland looks the size of Africa (spoiler: it’s not). Because the Earth is a sphere and paper is flat, things get stretched the further they are from the equator.
Australia is relatively close to the equator.
The US is further north.
This means the US often looks way bigger than it is relative to Australia on a standard map. When you use a tool like "The True Size Of," which corrects for this distortion, you realize that Australia is an absolute behemoth. It spans almost the same width as the US. Driving from Sydney to Perth is roughly the same distance as driving from New York to Los Angeles. That’s about 4,000 kilometers of road, dirt, and "are we there yet?"
Living on the Edge vs. Living Everywhere
Here is where the comparison gets really wild. Size is one thing, but how that land is used is a whole different story.
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The US has a population of over 340 million people. They are spread out everywhere. You’ve got massive cities in the middle of the country like Chicago, Dallas, and Denver. There’s infrastructure, highways, and Starbucks in almost every corner of the map.
Australia is different.
It’s basically a massive, empty donut.
Nearly 85% of the 27 million people in Australia live within 50 kilometers of the coast. The middle—the "Red Centre"—is incredibly harsh. We’re talking about the Outback, where a single cattle station (like Anna Creek Station) can be larger than the entire country of Israel or the state of New Jersey.
It’s hard to wrap your head around that. You can drive for twelve hours in the Northern Territory and not see a single town. In the US, you’d cross three state lines and pass fifty McDonald's in that time.
Why the Misconception Persists
- Coast-to-Coast Similarity: Both countries take about 5-6 hours to fly across.
- Island Continent Status: Because Australia is its own continent, we subconsciously give it more "weight" in our minds.
- Texas Comparisons: People love to say "Texas fits inside Australia X times." For the record, you could fit Texas into Australia about 11 times. It makes Australia feel infinite.
The Territorial Water Tussle
There’s a bit of a nerd-war regarding how the US calculates its size. For a long time, the US was ranked behind China. Then, the CIA World Factbook started including "territorial waters" and "coastal waters" in the total area for the US, which bumped it up.
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Most other countries, including Australia, don't always emphasize their water area in the same way when talking about "size." If you only look at dry land, the gap between the US and Australia narrows, but Alaska is simply too big of a "cheat code" for the US to lose the top spot.
Alaska is about 1.7 million square kilometers.
That’s more than twice the size of Texas.
Without Alaska, the US and Australia would be essentially neck-and-neck.
Travel Reality Check
If you're planning a trip thinking Australia is "just a bit bigger than a island," you're in for a shock. It is a continental landmass.
When people visit the US, they know they can't do NYC and Vegas in a weekend. Yet, tourists go to Australia and think they can "pop over" from Sydney to the Great Barrier Reef for lunch. That's a 3-hour flight. Or they think they can drive from Perth to Darwin in a couple of days. That is a 40-hour trek through some of the most isolated terrain on the planet.
Actionable Advice for Your Next Trip
- Don't drive the Outback alone: If you're tackling the center of Australia, you need a satellite phone and extra fuel. It’s not like the American Southwest where there’s a gas station every 50 miles.
- Flight is your friend: Unless you have three months, fly between the big cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane).
- Check the climate: Because Australia is so big, it has tropical rainforests in the north and snow-capped mountains in the south. You cannot pack for the whole country with one outfit.
At the end of the day, the US is geographically larger in total, but Australia is the "bigger" country in terms of raw, untouched, and uninhabited space. One is a packed house; the other is a massive backyard with a few people living on the porch. Regardless of the square kilometers, both are so big that you could spend a lifetime exploring them and still feel like you haven't seen half of it.