Russia vs Canada size comparison

Every way to compare Russia and Canada

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 Russia than Canada?

Russia covers 6,601,668 sq mi (17,098,242 sq km). Canada covers 3,855,103 sq mi (9,984,670 sq km). That makes Russia 1.71 times the size of Canada, or 71 percent larger. Put the other way, Canada is 58 percent of the size of Russia.

The difference is 7,113,572 sq km (2,746,566 sq mi).

Population: Russia vs Canada

Russia has more people: 140,134,279 against 39,187,155 for Canada, about 3.6 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, Russia has 8.2 people and Canada 3.9.

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.

Russia is centered near 66° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 6.0 times. Canada is centered near 60° N, where the factor is about 4.1. So on a Mercator map Russia looks roughly 2.5 times the size of Canada, against 1.71 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 Russia and Canada

Russia is the largest country by total area and Canada the second largest.

Canada has the longest coastline of any country, more than 200,000 km by the Factbook's count, thanks to its Arctic islands.

Sources and definitions

Russia: 17,098,242 sq km total, 16,377,742 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook.

Canada: 9,984,670 sq km total, 9,093,507 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook.

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.