Greenland vs USA size comparison

Every way to compare Greenland 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 Greenland?

The USA covers 3,796,742 sq mi (9,833,517 sq km). Greenland covers 836,330 sq mi (2,166,086 sq km). That makes the USA 4.54 times the size of Greenland, or 354 percent larger. Put the other way, Greenland is 22 percent of the size of the USA, and about 4.5 copies of Greenland would fit inside it.

The difference is 7,667,431 sq km (2,960,412 sq mi), about the size of Brazil (8,515,770 sq km).

Population: Greenland vs USA

The USA has more people: 338,016,259 against 57,751 for Greenland, about 5,853 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, Greenland has 0.0 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.

Greenland is centered near 73° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 11.8 times. The USA is centered near 45° N, where the factor is about 2.0. So on a Mercator map Greenland looks roughly 1.3 times the size of the USA, against 0.22 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 Greenland and USA

About 1,710,000 sq km of Greenland, roughly four fifths, lies under the ice sheet.

On Mercator world maps Greenland looks about as large as Africa. In fact Africa is about 14 times its size.

Sources and definitions

Greenland: 2,166,086 sq km total, from the CIA World Factbook. About 1,710,000 sq km, roughly four fifths, is under the ice sheet (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.