Alaska vs California size comparison

Every way to compare Alaska and California

Size depends on what you count. Total area includes lakes, rivers and coastal water; land area leaves them out. Every row below uses the same published sources.

How much bigger is Alaska than California?

Alaska covers 665,384 sq mi (1,723,337 sq km). California covers 163,695 sq mi (423,967 sq km). That makes Alaska 4.06 times the size of California, or 306 percent larger. Put the other way, California is 25 percent of the size of Alaska, and about 4.1 copies of California would fit inside it.

The difference is 1,299,370 sq km (501,690 sq mi).

Population: Alaska vs California

California has more people: 39,431,263 against 740,133 for Alaska, about 53 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, Alaska has 0.4 people and California 93.0.

Why the two look different on most world maps

Web maps and many classroom maps use the Mercator projection, which keeps shapes and directions true but enlarges areas away from the equator. The enlargement grows with latitude: an area at latitude φ is drawn about 1 / cos²(φ) times its size compared with the same area at the equator.

Alaska is centered near 64° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 5.2 times. California is centered near 37° N, where the factor is about 1.6. So on a Mercator map Alaska looks roughly 13.3 times the size of California, against 4.06 in reality. This uses each shape's center, so treat it as a rough guide.

The outlines at the top of this page use a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection centered on each shape, so their drawn areas compare the same way as the published figures. To drag any country across a map yourself, use the country size comparison tool.

More about Alaska and California

By NOAA's general coastline measure, Alaska has more coastline than all other states combined.

California has far more people on a quarter of the area. The city of Los Angeles alone has several times as many residents as all of Alaska.

Sources and definitions

Alaska: 1,723,337 sq km total, 1,477,953 sq km land, from the Census Bureau's state area measurements.

California: 423,967 sq km total, 403,466 sq km land, from the Census Bureau's state area measurements.

The CIA stopped publishing the World Factbook in February 2026. Figures here come from its final edition, read from a public mirror of the data, and will not change unless another official source replaces them. Outlines come from Natural Earth (via world-atlas) and Census cartographic boundary files, and are simplified for drawing; the numbers never come from the outlines.