Texas vs Alaska size comparison

Every way to compare Texas and Alaska

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 Alaska than Texas?

Alaska covers 665,384 sq mi (1,723,337 sq km). Texas covers 268,596 sq mi (695,662 sq km). That makes Alaska 2.48 times the size of Texas, or 148 percent larger. Put the other way, Texas is 40 percent of the size of Alaska, and about 2.5 copies of Texas would fit inside it.

The difference is 1,027,675 sq km (396,788 sq mi).

Population: Texas vs Alaska

Texas has more people: 31,290,831 against 740,133 for Alaska, about 42 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, Texas has 45.0 people and Alaska 0.4.

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.

Texas is centered near 32° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 1.4 times. Alaska is centered near 64° N, where the factor is about 5.2. So on a Mercator map Texas looks roughly 0.1 times the size of Alaska, against 0.40 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 Texas and Alaska

Split Alaska into two equal halves and each half, about 861,700 sq km, would still be larger than Texas, which would become the third largest state.

Texas has about 40 times as many people as Alaska.

Sources and definitions

Texas: 695,662 sq km total, 676,587 sq km land, from the Census Bureau's state area measurements.

Alaska: 1,723,337 sq km total, 1,477,953 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.