Is Australia Bigger Than Texas? 11x Larger

Texas is the yardstick Americans reach for whenever a place is described as huge, so "how big is Australia" often becomes "how many Texases is that." The answer is a lot more than one.

How Much Bigger Is Australia Than Texas?

Australia is about 11 times larger than Texas. Australia covers 7,692,024 km² (2,969,907 sq mi) and Texas covers 695,662 km² (268,597 sq mi) (CIA World Factbook, 2026), so Texas makes up roughly 9% of Australia's land area.

Put another way: you could drop eleven Texases onto the Australian continent and still have space for a twelfth, smaller one.

Where Does Texas Actually Fit on the Map?

Texas is the second-largest US state, but against Australia's biggest states it lands in the middle of the pack. Western Australia alone (2,646,338 km²) is nearly 3.8 times the size of Texas. Queensland (1,851,736 km²) is about 2.7 times larger, and South Australia (983,482 km²) and the Northern Territory (1,419,630 km²) both outsize it too. Even New South Wales (809,444 km²) edges Texas out by 16%.

Texas is bigger than two of Australia's states, though: Victoria (227,444 km²) is less than a third of Texas's size, and Tasmania (68,401 km²) is smaller still.

Why Texas Is the Default Comparison

"Everything's bigger in Texas" is a genuine part of American self-image, and at 695,662 km² it is the largest of the 48 contiguous states. That makes it the mental yardstick reached for whenever a country or region gets described as vast, even though Texas itself is a fraction of the country it belongs to: it is smaller than Alaska, and the entire United States is 9,833,517 km², more than 14 times Texas's size.

Using Texas as a size reference works for calibrating against everyday American geography. It does not work as a proxy for "big" once the comparison is a continent-spanning country like Australia.

Population: The Comparison Flips Completely

Land area is where Texas loses badly. Population is where it wins.

Texas is home to about 31.7 million people (US Census Bureau, 2025), while Australia has around 26.6 million. A single US state, 9% the size of Australia by area, has more residents than the entire Australian continent.

The density gap explains why: Texas averages roughly 46 people per km², while Australia averages about 3.5. Most Australians live in a handful of coastal cities, and the interior is largely empty desert. Texas, despite its own sparse western stretches, is far more evenly settled.

Terrain and Climate

Texas spans a genuine range of terrain for a single state: piney forest in the east, the Hill Country's limestone canyons in the centre, the Gulf Coast plain in the south, and the arid Trans-Pecos and Chihuahuan Desert in the west, where Guadalupe Peak reaches 2,667 m. Hurricanes reach the Gulf Coast; the Panhandle sees genuine winter cold and tornado activity.

Australia's terrain is more extreme at either end. Around 70% of the continent is arid or semi-arid Outback, but the tropical north holds monsoon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef runs along the northeast coast for over 2,300 km. The temperate south and east, where most Australians live, is the closest analogue to Texas's Hill Country, just at a vastly larger scale.

Interactive Exploration

Overlay the two and Texas barely covers a corner of Australia's east coast. Slide it across the continent and it takes eleven full moves before the ground is covered.

Which Economy Is Bigger?

This is the other place Texas comes out ahead despite the size gap. Texas's economy reached an estimated $2.9 trillion in 2025 (US Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2025), the second-largest of any US state after California. Australia's national economy is about $1.84 trillion (IMF, 2025).

A single US state, at 9% of Australia's land area, produces roughly 1.6 times Australia's entire national economic output. Texas's oil, gas, and technology sectors, combined with its sheer population, generate far more density of economic activity per square kilometre than Australia's resource-and-agriculture-driven economy spread across a mostly empty continent.

Fun Facts

Texas:

• Was its own independent republic from 1836 to 1845
• Produces more oil than any country in the world except the United States as a whole
• Has 254 counties, more than any other US state
• Houston's Johnson Space Center has run US human spaceflight missions since the 1960s

Australia:

• Home to more venomous snake species than any other country
• Has over 10,000 beaches, more than any other nation
• The Simpson Desert alone (176,500 km²) is a quarter the size of Texas
• Is the only country that is also an entire continent

Conclusion

Australia is more than 11 times the size of Texas, and Texas trails Australia's four biggest states. But Texas answers back on the numbers that matter for a place people actually live and work in: more people, and a larger economy, packed into a fraction of the land.

Texas is a genuinely enormous US state. It is simply the wrong unit for measuring a continent.