List
The 20 largest countries in the world
Russia tops this list with 17 098 242 km². Canada comes second. Here are the top 20, each one a link to its own page.
| # | Name | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Russia | 17 098 242 km² |
| 2 | Canada | 9 984 670 km² |
| 3 | China | 9 706 961 km² |
| 4 | United States | 9 372 610 km² |
| 5 | Brazil | 8 515 767 km² |
| 6 | Australia | 7 692 024 km² |
| 7 | India | 3 287 590 km² |
| 8 | Argentina | 2 780 400 km² |
| 9 | Kazakhstan | 2 724 900 km² |
| 10 | Algeria | 2 381 741 km² |
| 11 | DR Congo | 2 344 858 km² |
| 12 | Saudi Arabia | 2 149 690 km² |
| 13 | Mexico | 1 964 375 km² |
| 14 | Indonesia | 1 904 569 km² |
| 15 | Sudan | 1 886 068 km² |
| 16 | Libya | 1 759 540 km² |
| 17 | Iran | 1 648 195 km² |
| 18 | Mongolia | 1 564 110 km² |
| 19 | Peru | 1 285 216 km² |
| 20 | Chad | 1 284 000 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: Russia is about 13 times the figure for Chad, and Chad is still inside the top 20 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 largest countrie?
Russia 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 20, 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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