The largest countries in the world, by real area

What “largest” means in this table

Every figure here is total area in km² taken from the ISO country metadata that ships with the game, with one exception measured from geometry instead. It includes inland water, so the Great Lakes, the Caspian’s shorelines and Canada’s northern archipelago are inside the numbers they belong to. It excludes Antarctic land, because Antarctica is not a country and has no row in our data, and it excludes dependent territories — Greenland, the French and Dutch overseas collectivities, Western Sahara, Macau and Hong Kong are simply not entries here. That is why our top 50 and a Wikipedia top 50 are not the same list: theirs counts things this one does not have.

The consequence is worth stating plainly: 190 rows covering 130,789,943 km², and the ten largest of them account for 55.9% of it. Half the planet’s sovereign land surface is inside a list you can read in a minute.

The twenty largest countries

Share is each country’s proportion of the 130,789,943 km² in this dataset, so the column adds up to something you can check.

The top ten, as the outlines actually look

Area and shape are different problems. Russia and Canada are both enormous, but Canada arrives as 8 disconnected pieces — the Arctic archipelago is separate geometry, not one landmass — while Russia’s outline is one long mass with a Pacific fringe. These are the ten largest shapes in the game, silhouettes shown.

Ranks 21 to 50

Below the top 20 the list becomes a study in how partition handed out size: Angola, Mali, South Africa, Colombia, Ethiopia, Bolivia are mostly Saharan or Central Asian rectangles, and after them the areas fall by an order of magnitude every few rows.

One largest country per continent

The share column is how much of that continent’s land in our data belongs to its single biggest country. Africa is the flattest at 8% — Algeria does not dominate it, which is why the continent reads as a set of comparable shapes — while Oceania is the extreme at 91%, because Australia is most of the land there.

Area rank against population: size is not people

Read the two rankings together and the map becomes more useful. India carries roughly 1.37 bn people in 3,287,590 km², which is a third of Australia’s area and a fraction of Canada’s 37.6 m — a country with the second-largest landmass on this page holding about 7.6% of the area and a rounding error of the population. That inversion is why density, not size, is what makes a border memorable.

How we measure area here

Each country’s km² comes from the ISO metadata joined into the game’s data file by scripts that build the reference tables. Where no ISO record exists — one disputed territory in this dataset, and nothing else — the area is measured from the Natural Earth 50m admin-0 outline with a spherical polygon formula and flagged as measured, so the provenance of every number survives the build. Outlines are those same Natural Earth 50m shapes, simplified to a point budget: the detail scores quoted elsewhere on the site describe the geometry you draw, not each country’s true coastline, which is a much longer story. Related lists from the same pipeline: smallest countries, every capital, the African list, and all 190 countries.

Largest countries by area — questions