The most and least crowded countries on Earth
Monaco packs more than 18,000 people into each square kilometre. Mongolia has just over two. World Bank figures for 2024 on the countries at each extreme.
Population density is the number of people divided by land area. Averaged over the world’s land, it comes to about 60 people per square kilometre. For individual countries it ranges from under three to more than 18,000.
| Country | People per km² | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Monaco | 18,537 |
| 2 | Singapore | 8,329 |
| 3 | Bahrain | 1,986 |
| 4 | Malta | 1,805 |
| 5 | Maldives | 1,771 |
| 6 | Bangladesh | 1,333 |
| 7 | Palestine | 878 |
| 8 | Barbados | 655 |
| 9 | Mauritius | 623 |
| 10 | Rwanda | 600 |
City-states and islands
The top of the list is dominated by places with little land. Monaco is 2.1 square kilometres, smaller than New York’s Central Park, and home to almost 39,000 people. Singapore is a city-state on an island. Bahrain, Malta, the Maldives, Barbados and Mauritius are all small island nations. Their density is high mostly because their land is small, not because they are unusually crowded by world standards.
Bangladesh: the real outlier
Bangladesh is the striking entry. It is not a city or a small island. It is a country of more than 170 million people, the eighth-largest population in the world, on a land area of about 130,000 square kilometres. That is a little more than half the size of the United Kingdom. Its density of more than 1,300 people per square kilometre is far beyond any other large country. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in mainland Africa.
| Country | People per km² | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mongolia | 2.3 |
| 2 | Australia | 3.5 |
| 3 | Namibia | 3.7 |
| 4 | Iceland | 3.8 |
| 5 | Guyana | 3.9 |
| 6 | Suriname | 4.0 |
| 7 | Libya | 4.2 |
| 8 | Botswana | 4.4 |
| 9 | Canada | 4.7 |
| 10 | Mauritania | 5.0 |
Deserts, ice and forest
The emptiest countries are almost all defined by land that is hard to live on. Mongolia, Namibia, Libya, Botswana and Mauritania are mostly desert or steppe. Much of Australia is desert too, and its people are concentrated around the coast. Iceland and Canada have huge areas of tundra, ice and mountain. Guyana and Suriname are covered mostly in rainforest, with almost everyone living along a narrow coastal strip.
That makes national density a misleading number for these countries. Most Australians live in cities that are as dense as anywhere in Europe. The low figure is about the land nobody lives on.
Where the United Kingdom sits
The United Kingdom has about 286 people per square kilometre, on World Bank figures. That makes it one of the more densely populated large countries in Europe. It is a little over half as dense as the Netherlands (534), but more than twice as dense as France (127).
Density in Outrank
Density is one of the four statistics in Outrank, alongside population, area and life expectancy. It is the one players get wrong most often, because a big population makes a country feel crowded even when its land is huge. China has more people than almost anywhere but, at around 150 per square kilometre, is less dense than the United Kingdom.
Density in the ten most populous countries
Among the ten biggest countries by population, density varies by a factor of more than a hundred. Bangladesh is a long way ahead and Russia a long way behind.
| Country | Population (m) | People per km² |
|---|---|---|
| Bangladesh | 174 | 1,333 |
| India | 1,451 | 488 |
| Pakistan | 251 | 326 |
| Nigeria | 233 | 255 |
| China | 1,409 | 150 |
| Indonesia | 283 | 150 |
| Ethiopia | 132 | 118 |
| United States | 340 | 37 |
| Brazil | 212 | 25 |
| Russia | 144 | 9 |
India is the one to notice. It is more than three times as dense as China, with a similar population on about a third of the land. Much of China’s territory, in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, is high plateau or desert, while most of India is farmland.
Density is not wealth
There is no simple link between how crowded a country is and how rich it is. Two of the densest places in the world, Monaco and Singapore, are also among the wealthiest. So are two of the emptiest, Australia and Canada. Bangladesh and Rwanda are both very dense and both low-income, while Mongolia and Mauritania are very sparse and also low-income. What density does affect is how a country is organised. Dense countries tend to have more public transport and smaller homes, while sparse ones spend heavily on roads, flights and services spread over long distances.
That is worth remembering in Outrank. Knowing that a country is rich, or poor, tells you almost nothing about whether it is more densely populated than another.
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.