Delaware vs Rhode Island size comparison

Every way to compare Delaware and Rhode Island

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 Delaware than Rhode Island?

Delaware covers 2,489 sq mi (6,446 sq km). Rhode Island covers 1,545 sq mi (4,001 sq km). That makes Delaware 1.61 times the size of Rhode Island, or 61 percent larger. Put the other way, Rhode Island is 62 percent of the size of Delaware.

The difference is 2,445 sq km (944 sq mi).

Population: Delaware vs Rhode Island

Rhode Island has more people: 1,112,308 against 1,051,917 for Delaware, 6 percent more. Per square kilometer of total area, Delaware has 163.2 people and Rhode Island 278.0.

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.

Delaware is centered near 39° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 1.7 times. Rhode Island is centered near 42° N, where the factor is about 1.8. So on a Mercator map Delaware looks roughly 1.5 times the size of Rhode Island, against 1.61 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 Delaware and Rhode Island

Rhode Island is the smallest state by total area and Delaware is the second smallest. The District of Columbia is smaller than both but is not a state.

About a third of Rhode Island's total area is water: 1,324 of its 4,001 sq km.

Sources and definitions

Delaware: 6,446 sq km total, 5,047 sq km land, from the Census Bureau's state area measurements.

Rhode Island: 4,001 sq km total, 2,678 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.