List
Every landlocked country in the world
Kazakhstan tops this list with 2 724 900 km². Mongolia comes second. Here are the top 25, each one a link to its own page.
| # | Name | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kazakhstan | 2 724 900 km² |
| 2 | Mongolia | 1 564 110 km² |
| 3 | Chad | 1 284 000 km² |
| 4 | Niger | 1 267 000 km² |
| 5 | Mali | 1 240 192 km² |
| 6 | Ethiopia | 1 104 300 km² |
| 7 | Bolivia | 1 098 581 km² |
| 8 | Zambia | 752 612 km² |
| 9 | Afghanistan | 652 230 km² |
| 10 | Central African Republic | 622 984 km² |
| 11 | South Sudan | 619 745 km² |
| 12 | Botswana | 582 000 km² |
| 13 | Turkmenistan | 488 100 km² |
| 14 | Uzbekistan | 447 400 km² |
| 15 | Paraguay | 406 752 km² |
| 16 | Zimbabwe | 390 757 km² |
| 17 | Burkina Faso | 272 967 km² |
| 18 | Uganda | 241 550 km² |
| 19 | Laos | 236 800 km² |
| 20 | Belarus | 207 600 km² |
| 21 | Kyrgyzstan | 199 951 km² |
| 22 | Nepal | 147 181 km² |
| 23 | Tajikistan | 143 100 km² |
| 24 | Malawi | 118 484 km² |
| 25 | Hungary | 93 028 km² |
What is being measured here
Area is the whole surface a country covers — its land plus its lakes and rivers — written in square kilometres. One square kilometre is a square one kilometre long on every side, about the size of 140 football pitches. The figures come from the ISO 3166 dataset, which uses what each country officially reports.
The two ends of this list are further apart than they look: Kazakhstan is about 29 times the figure for Hungary, and Hungary is still inside the top 25 of the whole world.
How to read this list
Read the list from the top down. The left column is the rank, the middle one is the name — every name is a link to a page that explains the place for children — and the right column is the figure the ranking is built on. Nothing here is rounded to make a nicer story: if two entries are close together, they are genuinely close together.
Only countries that are members of the United Nations are ranked, so the list does not mix countries with territories that belong to another country. That is a choice, not a rule of nature, and a different atlas may well count differently.
Questions children ask
Which is the Every landlocked country in the world?
Kazakhstan is first on this list.
Where do the numbers in this list come from?
They come from public datasets, named at the bottom of this page, and the ranking is calculated from them rather than copied from another list. Where a figure is genuinely disputed, the page for that place says so.
How many entries are on this list?
This list shows 25, ordered by real figures from the datasets named at the bottom of the page.
Where these numbers come from
Areas, coastlines and neighbours from the ISO 3166 dataset; population from the World Bank (2018); mountain and river figures checked individually. Ranks are calculated, not copied.
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