List
The countries with the longest coastlines
Canada tops this list with 202 080 km. Indonesia comes second. Here are the top 20, each one a link to its own page.
| # | Name | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Canada | 202 080 km |
| 2 | Indonesia | 54 716 km |
| 3 | Philippines | 36 289 km |
| 4 | Japan | 29 751 km |
| 5 | Australia | 25 760 km |
| 6 | Norway | 25 148 km |
| 7 | United States | 19 924 km |
| 8 | New Zealand | 15 134 km |
| 9 | China | 14 500 km |
| 10 | Greece | 13 676 km |
| 11 | United Kingdom | 12 429 km |
| 12 | Mexico | 9 330 km |
| 13 | Italy | 7 600 km |
| 14 | Brazil | 7 491 km |
| 15 | Denmark | 7 314 km |
| 16 | Türkiye | 7 200 km |
| 17 | India | 7 000 km |
| 18 | Chile | 6 435 km |
| 19 | Croatia | 6 268 km |
| 20 | Micronesia | 6 112 km |
What is being measured here
Coastline length has a famous problem: the shorter your measuring stick, the longer the coast becomes, because every little bay and rock gets counted. Measure Norway's coast roughly and you get about two and a half thousand kilometres; measure every fjord and island and you get ten times that. All the figures here come from one source, so they can be compared with each other even though another atlas may print different numbers.
The two ends of this list are further apart than they look: Canada is about 33 times the figure for Micronesia, and Micronesia 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 countries with the longest coastlines?
Canada 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.
Last checked: