Texas vs California size comparison

Every way to compare Texas and California

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 Texas than California?

Texas covers 268,596 sq mi (695,662 sq km). California covers 163,695 sq mi (423,967 sq km). That makes Texas 1.64 times the size of California, or 64 percent larger. Put the other way, California is 61 percent of the size of Texas.

The difference is 271,695 sq km (104,902 sq mi), about the size of Colorado (269,601 sq km).

Population: Texas vs California

California has more people: 39,431,263 against 31,290,831 for Texas, 26 percent more. Per square kilometer of total area, Texas has 45.0 people and California 93.0.

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.

Texas is centered near 32° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 1.4 times. California is centered near 37° N, where the factor is about 1.6. So on a Mercator map Texas looks roughly 1.4 times the size of California, against 1.64 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 California

By total area Texas is the second largest state after Alaska, and California is third.

California has more water area than Texas in the Census table: 20,501 sq km against 19,075 sq km.

Sources and definitions

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

California: 423,967 sq km total, 403,466 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.