USA vs Europe size comparison

Every way to compare USA and Europe

Size depends on what you count. Total area includes lakes, rivers and coastal water; land area leaves them out. The question also has more than one reasonable reading, so each one gets its own row. Every row below uses the same published sources.

How much bigger is the USA than Europe?

The USA covers 3,796,742 sq mi (9,833,517 sq km). Europe covers 2,306,614 sq mi (5,974,104 sq km). That makes the USA 1.65 times the size of Europe, or 65 percent larger. Put the other way, Europe is 61 percent of the size of the USA.

The difference is 3,859,413 sq km (1,490,128 sq mi).

Population: USA vs Europe

Europe has more people: 602,795,022 against 338,016,259 for the USA, 78 percent more. Per square kilometer of total area, the USA has 34.4 people and Europe 100.9.

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. Europe is centered near 52° N, where the factor is about 2.6. So on a Mercator map the USA looks roughly 1.3 times the size of Europe, against 1.65 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 Europe

Most of Russia lies in Asia, so the answer depends on how much of Russia you count. Without Russia, the USA is clearly bigger. With all of Russia, Europe is more than twice the size of the USA. Counting only the part of Russia west of the Urals, the two come out within a few percent of each other, but no official body publishes one area for European Russia, so this page does not quote a figure for it.

Alaska alone, at 1,723,337 sq km, is larger than every European country except Russia. The largest of the rest is France, at 643,801 sq km with its overseas regions.

The 27 members of the European Union together cover 4,236,351 sq km, less than half the area of the USA.

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.

Europe: 5,974,104 sq km total, from the CIA World Factbook. Without Russia: the sum of the 54 countries and dependencies in the Factbook's Europe region, from Iceland and Svalbard to Ukraine and Cyprus, with France counted without its overseas regions. Turkey and the Caucasus are not included.

EU: 4,236,351 sq km total, from the CIA World Factbook. The 27 member states, with France's five overseas regions, as the Factbook counts it. The outline shows the European part.

Europe with all of Russia: 23,072,346 sq km total, from the CIA World Factbook. The Europe total above plus the whole of Russia, including Siberia.

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.