Alaska vs. Australia Size Comparison

The usual answer to "is Australia bigger than the US" is no, by 28%. That number quietly leans on Alaska. Take Alaska out, and the gap nearly disappears.

Is Australia Bigger Than the US Without Alaska?

Almost. The United States without Alaska — the other 49 states, Hawaii included — covers about 8,115,661 km², against Australia's 7,692,024 km² (CIA World Factbook, 2026). That is a gap of roughly 423,637 km², or about 5.5% — nowhere near the 28% difference the full US-vs-Australia comparison shows.

Alaska (1,717,856 km²) accounts for almost all of that missing 28 points. It is the single largest US state by a wide margin, and it is doing most of the work in the standard "USA is bigger than Australia" headline number.

How Big Is Alaska on Its Own?

Alaska alone is about 22% of Australia's total area, and roughly 4.5 Alaskas would fit inside the Australian continent. That still makes Alaska genuinely enormous by any other standard: it is larger than the next three biggest US states (Texas, California, and Montana) combined.

Compared against Australia's own states, though, Alaska is not even the biggest thing on the continent. Western Australia covers 2,646,338 km², about 54% more than Alaska — the second-largest subnational entity in the world, behind only Russia's Sakha Republic (roughly 3.08 million km²). Queensland, at 1,851,736 km², also edges out Alaska.

Why Alaska Gets Left Out of the Mental Math

Alaska sits apart from the other 48 states on almost every standard US map, usually shown in an inset box off the Pacific coast at a different scale, or omitted from smaller maps entirely. It rarely appears at true size and true position, so it is easy to forget just how much territory it represents when picturing "the United States."

Australia has no equivalent blind spot: the whole continent is drawn as one shape at one scale, states and all. That is part of why "Australia vs. the USA" numbers feel intuitive while "Australia vs. the USA without Alaska" catches people off guard.

Population: No Contest Either Way

Alaska's population is about 738,737 (Alaska Department of Labor, 2025), against Australia's roughly 26.6 million. Even setting area aside entirely, Australia has about 36 times Alaska's population spread across a landmass only 4.5 times larger, so Australia is also the far more densely settled of the two by a wide margin.

Terrain and Climate

Alaska is Arctic and subarctic: tundra in the north, the Alaska Range (home to Denali, North America's highest peak at 6,190 m) cutting across the interior, temperate rainforest along the southeastern panhandle, and glaciers covering roughly 5% of the state. Winters are long and severe across most of the interior, and parts of the north see weeks of continuous darkness or daylight depending on season.

Australia runs the opposite way: tropical monsoon in the north, temperate in the southeast, and roughly 70% arid to semi-arid desert across the interior. There is no Australian equivalent to Alaska's glaciers or permafrost; the closest analogue to Alaska's extremes is Tasmania's cool, wet climate, at a fraction of the scale.

Interactive Exploration

Drag Alaska across Australia and it covers a large but incomplete slice of the continent, well short of Western Australia's footprint alone.

Economy: A Different Kind of Scale

Alaska's state economy was about $72.6 billion in 2024 (US Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2024), driven heavily by oil and gas extraction, fishing, and tourism. Australia's national economy runs about $1.84 trillion (IMF, 2025), roughly 25 times Alaska's.

That gap has an obvious explanation: Alaska has under three-quarters of a million residents to Australia's 26.6 million, so there is simply far less economic activity to measure, even on a large landmass.

Fun Facts

Alaska:

• Purchased from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million, about two cents per acre
• Has more coastline than all other US states combined
• Home to Denali (6,190 m), the highest peak in North America
• Roughly 5% of the state is covered in glaciers

Australia:

• The only country that is also an entire continent
• Western Australia, its largest state, is the world's second-biggest subnational entity, behind only Russia's Sakha Republic
• Home to the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef system
• Around 70% of the continent is arid or semi-arid

Conclusion

Alaska is the reason "the US is 28% bigger than Australia" is true, and the reason the comparison feels lopsided. Strip Alaska out and the remaining US states are barely bigger than Australia at all, a 5.5% gap rather than more than a quarter. Alaska itself, meanwhile, would only be the second-largest state if it were dropped into Australia.