The world’s biggest and smallest countries, by land and by people

Russia is almost twice the size of the next-largest country. India has overtaken China in population. And Monaco is smaller than New York’s Central Park.

There are two common ways to measure the size of a country: how much land it covers, and how many people live there. The two lists overlap less than you might expect. Here are both, at each extreme, using the World Bank’s 2024 figures.

Russia, and then a gap

Russia’s land area is almost as large as China’s and the United States’ put together. It has about 11% of all the land on Earth. The next five countries are surprisingly close to each other: China, the US, Canada, Brazil and Australia are all between 7.7 and 9.4 million square kilometres. After Australia there is another big gap, down to India at less than three million.

These figures are land area, so lakes and inland water are left out. That is why Canada, with its huge number of lakes, comes fourth here. On total area including water, it is second only to Russia.

India passes China

India overtook China as the world’s most populous country in 2023, and by 2024 the gap was more than 40 million people. China’s population has started to fall, while India’s is still growing. Together they account for more than a third of everyone on Earth.

Five countries appear in both top tens: China, India, the United States, Brazil and Russia. Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Ethiopia are large in people but not in land. Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Argentina are the opposite.

The smallest countries

Monaco is by far the smallest by land, at 2.1 square kilometres. Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation, has the smallest population of any country with World Bank data, under 10,000 people. Vatican City is smaller than both, but the World Bank does not publish figures for it.

Several of the smallest countries are Pacific islands. Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau and the Marshall Islands together have fewer than 80,000 people. Their land is small, but their sea territory is enormous. Each controls a stretch of ocean many thousands of times larger than its land.

Size in the games

Area and population are two of the four statistics in Outrank. The trap is usually area. Map projections exaggerate countries far from the equator, so Canada and Russia look even bigger than they are, and countries near the equator, such as Brazil and DR Congo, look smaller. In Borderline every outline is shown at the same size, so you cannot use scale as a clue.

Where the world’s people live

Adding up the World Bank figures by region gives a clear picture of how unevenly people are spread. The total for the countries in our data is about 8.1 billion.

Asia has almost three in five of the world’s people. Africa has overtaken both the Americas and Europe and is the fastest-growing region. Europe had about a quarter of the world’s population in 1900. It now has less than a tenth.

The typical country is smaller than you think

The extremes get the attention, but most countries are small. Of the 195 countries with World Bank population figures, the one in the middle has about 9.1 million people, roughly the size of Belarus, Austria, Switzerland or Hungary. The middle country by land area covers about 120,000 square kilometres, close to North Korea, Eritrea or Greece. Only 16 countries have more than 100 million people, and 37 have fewer than one million.

By either measure, then, a country the size of the United Kingdom is in the top third. The UK has about 69 million people on just over 240,000 square kilometres of land, which makes it bigger than most countries in population and larger than average in area too.

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Sources and method

Statistics are the World Bank’s World Development Indicators for 2024 (population SP.POP.TOTL, land area AG.LND.TOTL.K2, population density EN.POP.DNST, life expectancy SP.DYN.LE00.IN), licensed CC BY 4.0 and retrieved on 8 October 2026. These are the figures Outrank uses. Only sovereign states with World Bank data are ranked.