Texas vs France size comparison

Every way to compare Texas and France

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 France?

Texas covers 268,596 sq mi (695,662 sq km). France covers 212,935 sq mi (551,500 sq km). That makes Texas 1.26 times the size of France, or 26 percent larger. Put the other way, France is 79 percent of the size of Texas.

The difference is 144,162 sq km (55,661 sq mi), about the size of Iowa (145,746 sq km).

Population: Texas vs France

France has more people: 68,512,806 against 31,290,831 for Texas, about 2.2 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, Texas has 45.0 people and France 124.2.

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. France is centered near 47° N, where the factor is about 2.1. So on a Mercator map Texas looks roughly 0.8 times the size of France, against 1.26 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 France

France on this page means metropolitan France, including Corsica, at 551,500 sq km. Even with its five overseas regions, 643,801 sq km, France is smaller than Texas.

France has more than twice as many people as Texas.

Sources and definitions

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

France: 551,500 sq km total, 549,970 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook. Metropolitan France, including Corsica. With its five overseas regions France covers 643,801 sq km.

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.