USA vs Canada size comparison

Every way to compare USA and Canada

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 Canada than the USA?

Canada covers 3,855,103 sq mi (9,984,670 sq km). The USA covers 3,796,742 sq mi (9,833,517 sq km). That makes Canada 1.02 times the size of the USA, or 2 percent larger. Put the other way, the USA is 98 percent of the size of Canada.

The difference is 151,153 sq km (58,360 sq mi), about the size of Illinois (149,995 sq km).

Population: USA vs Canada

The USA has more people: 338,016,259 against 39,187,155 for Canada, about 8.6 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, the USA has 34.4 people and Canada 3.9.

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. Canada is centered near 60° N, where the factor is about 4.1. So on a Mercator map the USA looks roughly 0.5 times the size of Canada, against 0.98 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 Canada

Canada is bigger in total, but the USA has more land. Almost 9 percent of Canada's total is water, much of it in its lakes.

Canada has roughly a ninth as many people as the USA, so it is far more thinly settled.

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.

Canada: 9,984,670 sq km total, 9,093,507 sq km land, from the CIA World Factbook.

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.