California vs Florida size comparison

Every way to compare California and Florida

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 California than Florida?

California covers 163,695 sq mi (423,967 sq km). Florida covers 65,758 sq mi (170,312 sq km). That makes California 2.49 times the size of Florida, or 149 percent larger. Put the other way, Florida is 40 percent of the size of California, and about 2.5 copies of Florida would fit inside it.

The difference is 253,655 sq km (97,937 sq mi), about the size of Wyoming (253,335 sq km).

Population: California vs Florida

California has more people: 39,431,263 against 23,372,215 for Florida, 69 percent more. Per square kilometer of total area, California has 93.0 people and Florida 137.2.

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.

California is centered near 37° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 1.6 times. Florida is centered near 29° N, where the factor is about 1.3. So on a Mercator map California looks roughly 3.0 times the size of Florida, against 2.49 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 California and Florida

Florida has more water area than California: 31,424 sq km against 20,501 sq km in the Census table, including coastal waters and lakes such as Okeechobee.

California is the most populous state and Florida the third, after Texas.

Sources and definitions

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

Florida: 170,312 sq km total, 138,887 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.