Brazil vs USA size comparison

Every way to compare Brazil and USA

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 USA than Brazil?

The USA covers 3,796,742 sq mi (9,833,517 sq km). Brazil covers 3,287,957 sq mi (8,515,770 sq km). That makes the USA 1.15 times the size of Brazil, or 15 percent larger. Put the other way, Brazil is 87 percent of the size of the USA.

The difference is 1,317,747 sq km (508,785 sq mi).

Population: Brazil vs USA

The USA has more people: 338,016,259 against 221,359,387 for Brazil, 53 percent more. Per square kilometer of total area, Brazil has 26.0 people and the USA 34.4.

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.

Brazil is centered near 11° S, where Mercator inflates areas about 1.0 times. The USA is centered near 45° N, where the factor is about 2.0. So on a Mercator map Brazil looks roughly 0.5 times the size of the USA, against 0.87 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 Brazil and USA

By total area Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, after Russia, Canada, the USA and China.

The lower 48 states alone, 8,081,867 sq km, are slightly smaller than Brazil.

Sources and definitions

Brazil: 8,515,770 sq km total, 8,358,140 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook.

USA: 9,833,517 sq km total, 9,147,593 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook. 50 states and DC, without Puerto Rico or other territories. The Factbook and the Census Bureau give the same total.

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.