Size is weird. When you look at a standard wall map in a classroom, Greenland looks like this massive, icy titan that could swallow Africa whole. It's a lie. Honestly, it’s just a byproduct of the Mercator projection, a 16th-century navigation tool that stretches things near the poles to keep straight lines straight for sailors. If you actually look at a factual list of countries by size, you realize Greenland is about fourteen times smaller than Africa. Maps mess with our heads, but the raw numbers from the UN Population Division and official national geographic institutes tell a much more grounded story about who actually owns the most dirt on this planet.
Russia is the obvious king. It’s huge. It’s so big that it covers about 11% of the world's total landmass, stretching across eleven time zones. You could fit the entire United Kingdom into Russia about 70 times and still have room for a few smaller European nations. But after Russia, the "who is bigger" debate gets surprisingly messy because of how we define "size." Are we talking just land? Or does the water inside the borders—lakes, rivers, coastal inlets—count too?
The Giants: Breaking Down the List of Countries by Size
The top of the leaderboard is dominated by the Big Five. These are the only nations that cross the seven-million-square-kilometer threshold.
Russia sits at the top with roughly 17.1 million square kilometers. It’s a monster. Even after the USSR collapsed, nothing else comes close. Then you have Canada. Canada is basically a giant collection of lakes disguised as a country. It clocks in at 9.98 million square kilometers. Here is the kicker: about 9% of Canada is just water. If you only counted dry land, Canada would actually drop below the United States and China.
Speaking of the US and China, this is where the list of countries by size gets political. Depending on who you ask—the CIA World Factbook or the UN—the ranking for number three and four flips. The United States claims about 9.83 million square kilometers, but that includes "territorial waters." China claims about 9.6 million, but they don't usually include their coastal waters in that specific figure, and there are constant disputes over territories like Aksai Chin or Taiwan. If you’re just looking at land area, China is generally considered the second-largest landmass country after Russia, leaving Canada and the US to fight over the "total area" scrap.
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Brazil rounds out the top five at 8.5 million square kilometers. It’s the heartbeat of South America, taking up nearly half the continent. It’s bigger than the contiguous United States. People often forget that. You could drive for days in the Amazon and never see a city, let alone a border.
The Mid-Tier Powerhouses and Geography Shocks
Once you move past the top five, the scale drops off a bit, but the countries are still gargantuan. Australia is the only one that is its own continent. It sits at about 7.7 million square kilometers. It’s essentially a massive desert fringed by some of the most beautiful beaches on Earth.
Then there’s India. At 3.28 million square kilometers, it’s the seventh-largest country, but it feels infinitely bigger because of the sheer density of people. Compare that to Australia, which has more than double the land but a fraction of the population. It’s a weird paradox of geography.
Why Does Size Actually Matter?
It isn't just about bragging rights at the UN. Size dictates resources. It dictates climate diversity.
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- Agricultural Output: Russia and the US have massive "breadbasket" regions because they have the literal space for industrial-scale farming.
- Geopolitics: Large countries are harder to invade but harder to govern. Think about the logistics of building a high-speed rail across China versus a small nation like Belgium.
- Biodiversity: Brazil's size allows for the Amazon, which is a literal lung for the planet.
Argentina and Kazakhstan are the quiet giants. Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world. It’s nearly 2.7 million square kilometers of steppe and mountains, yet it rarely makes the "big country" highlight reel in Western media. Argentina follows closely behind, stretching from the tropical north down to the frigid tips of Patagonia.
The Tiny Percent: The Other End of the Spectrum
If we look at the bottom of the list of countries by size, the numbers get hilariously small. Vatican City is less than half a square kilometer. You can walk across the entire country in about twenty minutes if you don't get stopped by a Swiss Guard. Monaco isn't much bigger at about 2 square kilometers. These "microstates" exist often because of weird historical loopholes or protective treaties with their larger neighbors.
The Problem with Measuring "Size"
We have to talk about the "Coastline Paradox." It’s a real geographic headache. Basically, the more closely you measure a coastline—down to the centimeter—the longer it becomes. This makes "total area" a bit of a moving target.
Furthermore, some countries are growing or shrinking. The Netherlands famously "creates" land through polders. Volcanic activity in places like Japan or Iceland occasionally adds a few acres. On the flip side, rising sea levels are actively eating away at the landmass of island nations like Kiribati or the Maldives. A list of countries by size written in 1920 looks very different from one in 2026, and it will look different again in 2100.
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Looking Past the Numbers
Size is a vanity metric if you don't have the infrastructure to manage it. Algeria is the largest country in Africa (2.38 million sq km), having taken the title after Sudan split in two back in 2011. Most of it is the Sahara Desert. While it’s huge on a map, the "habitable" size is much smaller. This distinction between total area and "ecumene" (inhabited land) is what actually determines how a country functions.
- Russia: 17,098,242 $km^2$
- Canada: 9,984,670 $km^2$
- United States: 9,833,517 $km^2$
- China: 9,596,960 $km^2$
- Brazil: 8,515,767 $km^2$
- Australia: 7,692,024 $km^2$
- India: 3,287,263 $km^2$
- Argentina: 2,780,400 $km^2$
- Kazakhstan: 2,724,900 $km^2$
- Algeria: 2,381,741 $km^2$
Greenland isn't on this list because it's technically a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, though it has massive autonomy. If it were an independent country, it would slot in right around number 12, just behind the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Actionable Insights for the Curious
If you are a traveler or a student of geography, don't just look at the raw square footage. Look at the Arable Land percentage. That tells you if a country can feed itself. Look at the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which tells you how much ocean they control—this is often where the real wealth (oil and fish) is located.
To get a true sense of scale, use tools like "The True Size Of." It allows you to drag countries over each other on a Mercator map to see how they actually compare without the polar distortion. Dragging the DR Congo over Europe is a wake-up call; it covers almost the entire Western half of the continent.
Geography is shifting. Borders change through conflict, and landmass changes through climate. Staying updated on the list of countries by size is less about memorizing stats and more about understanding the physical constraints and opportunities of the nations that shape our global economy. Check the latest satellite data from NASA or the ESA for the most precise measurements, as even a few meters of coastal erosion can shift the rankings over a decade.