Area
The total surface area of a country in square kilometres, including land and inland water bodies.
How it is measured
Derived from national cartographic surveys and international boundary datasets. Totals split into land area and water area; coastlines and disputed territories complicate exact figures.
Where the number came from
Measuring national territory precisely is a surprisingly recent achievement. Cadastral surveys existed to tax land, but they were local and mutually incompatible; it took the metric system, the 1875 Metre Convention, and eventually satellite geodesy before two countries could state their sizes in units that meant the same thing. The result is that "area" is not one quantity but a family of them. A country has a land area, a total area including inland water, an area including territorial sea, and an area including or excluding whatever it claims but does not control. Statistical agencies pick a convention and stay with it, which is fine within a country and treacherous across them. That is why an area figure needs its convention attached at least as much as an economic figure needs its year.
Worked example: the flip between China and the United States
This is the classic case, and our own numbers reproduce it exactly. The Factbook gives the United States a total area of 9,833,517 km², broken out as 9,147,593 km² of land and 685,924 km² of water. China’s comparable total is 9,596,960 km². Compare totals and the United States is the larger country by about 236,000 km². Compare land only and China is larger by about 449,000 km², because roughly seven percent of the American total is the Great Lakes and other inland water. Both statements are true; they are answers to different questions. This is precisely why the seven overrides above exist: before them, our United States figure came from a pre-2007 convention that excluded territorial waters while our China figure used the inclusive one, so two adjacent rows in the same ranked table were measured on opposite bases and the ordering was an artefact of the mismatch rather than a fact about either country. Neither Russia nor Canada is affected by any of this: at 17,098,242 km² and 9,984,670 km² they sit clear of the argument.
Figures read from our own area table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
The mledoze/countries reference dataset (ODbL 1.0) supplies the figure for most entities; the CIA Factbook archive supplies it where the reference dataset has none, and for seven countries where the reference figure is measured on a basis that would corrupt a ranking. As the data stands, 236 of our 261 entities carry the reference figure and 25 carry the archive figure. Every profile records which of the two it used, so the choice is auditable rather than hidden.
Refresh cadence: Static. It is not fetched on the refresh at all, and it carries no observation year; it changes only when a border moves, a survey is revised, or we re-vendor the reference dataset.
What to watch for
Area figures differ between sources depending on whether they count inland water, territorial sea, dependencies, or disputed regions, so a difference between two sources is usually a difference of convention rather than an error by either. The seven documented exceptions where we override the reference figure are all cases where the convention broke a comparison: the reference figures for China and Serbia include territory this corpus counts as a separate entity (Aksai Chin, Kosovo), the French figure covers Metropolitan France only while no entity here carries the overseas départements, Singapore’s predates decades of land reclamation, South Sudan’s and Comoros’ are lone outliers against both the CIA and Wikidata, and the United States figure excluded territorial waters, which ranked it below a China measured on the inclusive basis. We leave genuine convention differences (the Philippines, Pakistan’s treatment of Kashmir, Israel, Gambia, Uruguay) alone rather than adjudicate them.
CIA World Factbook equivalent field: "Area" (frozen at the January 2026 final edition; our figures continue from live sources).