Saudi Arabia vs Texas size comparison

Every way to compare Saudi Arabia and Texas

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 Saudi Arabia than Texas?

Saudi Arabia covers 830,000 sq mi (2,149,690 sq km). Texas covers 268,596 sq mi (695,662 sq km). That makes Saudi Arabia 3.09 times the size of Texas, or 209 percent larger. Put the other way, Texas is 32 percent of the size of Saudi Arabia, and about 3.1 copies of Texas would fit inside it.

The difference is 1,454,028 sq km (561,403 sq mi).

Population: Saudi Arabia vs Texas

Saudi Arabia has more people: 36,544,431 against 31,290,831 for Texas, 17 percent more. Per square kilometer of total area, Saudi Arabia has 17.0 people and Texas 45.0.

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.

Saudi Arabia is centered near 24° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 1.2 times. Texas is centered near 32° N, where the factor is about 1.4. So on a Mercator map Saudi Arabia looks roughly 2.7 times the size of Texas, against 3.09 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 Saudi Arabia and Texas

Saudi Arabia has no permanent rivers or lakes, so the Factbook lists its water area as zero.

Saudi Arabia has only a few million more people than Texas on about three times the area, so Texas is more than twice as densely populated.

Sources and definitions

Saudi Arabia: 2,149,690 sq km total, 2,149,690 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook.

Texas: 695,662 sq km total, 676,587 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.