USA vs Africa size comparison

Every way to compare USA and Africa

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 Africa than the USA?

Africa covers 11,808,024 sq mi (30,582,641 sq km). The USA covers 3,796,742 sq mi (9,833,517 sq km). That makes Africa 3.11 times the size of the USA, or 211 percent larger. Put the other way, the USA is 32 percent of the size of Africa, and about 3.1 copies of the USA would fit inside it.

The difference is 20,749,124 sq km (8,011,282 sq mi).

Population: USA vs Africa

Africa has more people: 1,525,702,059 against 338,016,259 for the USA, about 4.5 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, the USA has 34.4 people and Africa 49.9.

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 USA is centered near 45° N, where Mercator inflates areas about 2.0 times. Africa is centered near 7° N, where the factor is about 1.0. So on a Mercator map the USA looks roughly 0.6 times the size of Africa, against 0.32 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 USA and Africa

Together, the USA, China, India and Europe without Russia cover about 28.7 million sq km, still less than Africa's 30.6 million.

Africa is the second largest continent after Asia. Mercator maps make it look smaller than it is because it sits on the equator, where that projection does not enlarge areas.

Sources and definitions

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.

Africa: 30,582,641 sq km total, from the CIA World Factbook. The sum of the 56 entries in the Factbook's Africa region: 54 countries, Western Sahara and Saint Helena.

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.