The 10 Largest Countries in the World by Area

Six of the ten largest countries in the world border an ocean most people rarely picture them next to, and four of them are large enough on their own to make the standard world map genuinely misleading. Here is the actual ranking, and why it looks different depending on how you measure.

The 10 Largest Countries by Area

(CIA World Factbook, 2026, total area including inland and territorial waters.)

Russia alone spans 11 time zones and covers more than a ninth of the entire Earth's land surface.

Why the Rankings Shift Depending on What You Count

"Largest country" sounds like a settled fact. It isn't quite. Total area counts a country's land plus its inland lakes, rivers, and territorial waters; land area counts dry ground only. Most of this top 10 barely moves between the two measures, but the United States and China trade places: by total area the US ranks 3rd and China 4th, while by land area alone China edges ahead into 3rd. The US carries more territorial and inland water into its total than China does, which is the entire gap.

Argentina and Algeria are close enough (2,780,400 km² vs 2,381,741 km², about 17% apart) that they occasionally get reordered in looser or older sources too, though CIA World Factbook figures consistently place Argentina ahead.

How the Top 10 Breaks Down by Continent

Asia holds the most entries once Russia's Asian territory is counted: Russia straddles Europe and Asia, and China, India, and Kazakhstan sit entirely or mostly in Asia. North America contributes Canada and the United States. South America contributes Brazil and Argentina. Africa's sole representative is Algeria, its largest country since Sudan split into two in 2011. Oceania's only entry, Australia, is also the only one of the ten that is a single country occupying an entire continent.

Europe, despite containing dozens of countries, has no representative in the top 10 on its own; even Russia's European portion, taken alone, would not qualify. That imbalance is part of why Canada looks roughly the same size as all of Europe combined when the two are actually overlaid — Europe's land area is fragmented across nearly 50 separate countries rather than concentrated in one.

Just Outside the Top 10

The next tier down includes the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Indonesia, and Sudan — each large by any ordinary standard, but each also under a third of Argentina's area in 8th place. The gap between "one of the ten biggest countries on Earth" and "just missed it" is enormous in absolute terms, even though it looks like a single rung on a list.

Greenland, often mistaken for a country-sized landmass in this conversation, is not a sovereign state; it is an autonomous territory of Denmark. At 2,166,086 km² it would rank around 12th if it were counted as its own country, which is part of why it is so frequently, and wrongly, pictured as bigger than it is — see how badly Mercator distorts Greenland specifically.

Common Misconceptions From Standard Maps

Nearly every landmass in this list sits far enough from the equator that a standard Mercator web map inflates it. Russia and Canada, both deep in high latitudes, look even more dominant on-screen than their considerable real size already justifies. Meanwhile Brazil, Australia, and Kazakhstan's southern reaches sit closer to the equator and are comparatively underinflated by the same projection, making the size gap between, say, Canada and Brazil look larger on a wall map than the true 1.17-to-1 ratio.

This is the recurring theme across every comparison on this site: area rankings from a table are accurate, but the picture in your head of how those countries relate to each other is usually shaped by a 16th-century navigation tool, not by geography.

Fun Facts

• Russia's Far East is closer to Alaska than to Moscow; the Bering Strait separating Russia from the US is only about 82 km wide at its narrowest.
• Canada has the longest coastline of any country by a wide margin, at roughly 202,080 km, more than the next several countries combined.
• China and India together hold more than a third of the world's population on a combined land area smaller than Russia alone.
• Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world; no coastline touches open ocean.

Conclusion

The ten largest countries by area cover roughly half of Earth's land surface between them, led by Russia at nearly twice the size of second-place Canada. Where the list gets genuinely interesting is not the ranking itself but how differently these countries are settled: Russia and Canada, ranks 1 and 2, are among the most sparsely populated nations on Earth, while much smaller countries elsewhere hold vastly more people. Area alone tells only part of the story.