Mexico vs USA size comparison

Every way to compare Mexico 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 Mexico?

The USA covers 3,796,742 sq mi (9,833,517 sq km). Mexico covers 758,449 sq mi (1,964,375 sq km). That makes the USA 5.01 times the size of Mexico, or 401 percent larger. Put the other way, Mexico is 20 percent of the size of the USA, and about 5.0 copies of Mexico would fit inside it.

The difference is 7,869,142 sq km (3,038,293 sq mi), about the size of Brazil (8,515,770 sq km). For a US reference point, Mexico is closest in total area to Alaska, at 1,723,337 sq km.

Population: Mexico vs USA

The USA has more people: 338,016,259 against 130,739,927 for Mexico, about 2.6 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, Mexico has 66.6 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.

Mexico is centered near 24° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 1.2 times. The USA is centered near 45° N, where the factor is about 2.0. So on a Mercator map Mexico looks roughly 0.1 times the size of the USA, against 0.20 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 Mexico and USA

Mexico is about 2.8 times the size of Texas, the US state it borders for the longest stretch.

Mexico is a little smaller than Greenland: 1,964,375 sq km against 2,166,086 sq km.

Sources and definitions

Mexico: 1,964,375 sq km total, 1,943,945 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.