Alaska vs Lower 48 size comparison

Every way to compare Alaska and Lower 48

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 the lower 48 than Alaska?

The lower 48 covers 3,120,426 sq mi (8,081,867 sq km). Alaska covers 665,384 sq mi (1,723,337 sq km). That makes the lower 48 4.69 times the size of Alaska, or 369 percent larger. Put the other way, Alaska is 21 percent of the size of the lower 48, and about 4.7 copies of Alaska would fit inside it.

The difference is 6,358,530 sq km (2,455,042 sq mi).

Population: Alaska vs Lower 48

The lower 48 has more people: 337,924,709 against 740,133 for Alaska, about 457 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, Alaska has 0.4 people and the lower 48 41.8.

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. The lower 48 is centered near 40° N, where the factor is about 1.7. So on a Mercator map Alaska looks roughly 0.7 times the size of the lower 48, against 0.21 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 Lower 48

Alaska has the most water area of any state. Its 245,383 sq km of water alone is larger than the whole UK.

Maps of the lower 48 usually shrink Alaska into an inset box, while Mercator world maps stretch it. Both make its real size hard to judge.

Sources and definitions

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

Lower 48: 8,081,867 sq km total, 7,653,005 sq km land, from the Census Bureau's state area measurements. The 48 contiguous states and DC: the Census US total minus Alaska and Hawaii.

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.