USA vs China size comparison

Every way to compare USA and China

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 China?

The USA covers 3,796,742 sq mi (9,833,517 sq km). China covers 3,705,407 sq mi (9,596,960 sq km). That makes the USA 1.02 times the size of China, or 2 percent larger. Put the other way, China is 98 percent of the size of the USA.

The difference is 236,557 sq km (91,335 sq mi), about the size of the UK (243,610 sq km).

Population: USA vs China

China has more people: 1,407,181,209 against 338,016,259 for the USA, about 4.2 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, the USA has 34.4 people and China 146.6.

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. China is centered near 37° N, where the factor is about 1.6. So on a Mercator map the USA looks roughly 1.3 times the size of China, against 1.02 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 USA and China

The answer flips with the measure. The USA has the larger total area, but China has more land: 9,326,410 sq km against 9,147,593 sq km.

The US total counts inland, coastal, Great Lakes and territorial water, which is why some lists put China ahead of the USA and others put it behind.

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.

China: 9,596,960 sq km total, 9,326,410 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.