UK vs USA size comparison

Every way to compare UK and USA

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 the USA than the UK?

The USA covers 3,796,742 sq mi (9,833,517 sq km). The UK covers 94,058 sq mi (243,610 sq km). That makes the USA 40.37 times the size of the UK, or 3,937 percent larger. Put the other way, the UK is 2 percent of the size of the USA, and about 40 copies of the UK would fit inside it.

The difference is 9,589,907 sq km (3,702,684 sq mi), about the size of China (9,596,960 sq km). For a US reference point, the UK is closest in total area to Michigan, at 250,487 sq km.

Population: UK vs USA

The USA has more people: 338,016,259 against 68,751,311 for the UK, about 4.9 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, the UK has 282.2 people and the USA 34.4.

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.

The UK is centered near 54° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 2.9 times. The USA is centered near 45° N, where the factor is about 2.0. So on a Mercator map the UK looks roughly 0.0 times the size of the USA, against 0.02 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 UK and USA

England covers 53 percent of the UK, Scotland 32 percent, Wales 9 percent and Northern Ireland 6 percent, according to the Factbook.

The UK lies farther north than any US state except Alaska: London, at about 51.5° N, is north of every point in the lower 48 states.

Sources and definitions

UK: 243,610 sq km total, 241,930 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, including Shetland and Rockall.

USA: 9,833,517 sq km total, 9,147,593 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook. 50 states and DC, without Puerto Rico or other territories. The Factbook and the Census Bureau give the same total.

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.