USA vs Russia size comparison

Every way to compare USA and Russia

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 Russia than the USA?

Russia covers 6,601,668 sq mi (17,098,242 sq km). The USA covers 3,796,742 sq mi (9,833,517 sq km). That makes Russia 1.74 times the size of the USA, or 74 percent larger. Put the other way, the USA is 58 percent of the size of Russia.

The difference is 7,264,725 sq km (2,804,926 sq mi).

Population: USA vs Russia

The USA has more people: 338,016,259 against 140,134,279 for Russia, about 2.4 times as many. Per square kilometer of total area, the USA has 34.4 people and Russia 8.2.

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. Russia is centered near 66° N, where the factor is about 6.0. So on a Mercator map the USA looks roughly 0.2 times the size of Russia, against 0.58 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 Russia

Russia is the largest country in the world. It spans eleven time zones, from Kaliningrad at UTC+2 to Kamchatka at UTC+12. The 50 states span six.

Russia has fewer people than the USA, about 140 million against 338 million, on more than one and a half times the area.

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.

Russia: 17,098,242 sq km total, 16,377,742 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.