List
The 20 smallest countries in the world
Vatican City tops this list with 0 km². Monaco comes second. Here are the top 20, each one a link to its own page.
| # | Name | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vatican City | 0 km² |
| 2 | Monaco | 2 km² |
| 3 | Nauru | 21 km² |
| 4 | Tuvalu | 26 km² |
| 5 | San Marino | 61 km² |
| 6 | Liechtenstein | 160 km² |
| 7 | Marshall Islands | 181 km² |
| 8 | Saint Kitts and Nevis | 261 km² |
| 9 | Maldives | 300 km² |
| 10 | Malta | 316 km² |
| 11 | Grenada | 344 km² |
| 12 | Saint Vincent and the Grenadines | 389 km² |
| 13 | Barbados | 430 km² |
| 14 | Antigua and Barbuda | 442 km² |
| 15 | Seychelles | 452 km² |
| 16 | Palau | 459 km² |
| 17 | Andorra | 468 km² |
| 18 | Saint Lucia | 616 km² |
| 19 | Micronesia | 702 km² |
| 20 | Singapore | 710 km² |
What is being measured here
Area is the whole surface a country covers — its land plus its lakes and rivers — written in square kilometres. One square kilometre is a square one kilometre long on every side, about the size of 140 football pitches. The figures come from the ISO 3166 dataset, which uses what each country officially reports.
The two ends of this list are further apart than they look: Vatican City is about 1 614 times the figure for Singapore, and Singapore is still inside the top 20 of the whole world.
How to read this list
Read the list from the top down. The left column is the rank, the middle one is the name — every name is a link to a page that explains the place for children — and the right column is the figure the ranking is built on. Nothing here is rounded to make a nicer story: if two entries are close together, they are genuinely close together.
Only countries that are members of the United Nations are ranked, so the list does not mix countries with territories that belong to another country. That is a choice, not a rule of nature, and a different atlas may well count differently.
Questions children ask
Which is the smallest countrie?
Vatican City is first on this list.
Where do the numbers in this list come from?
They come from public datasets, named at the bottom of this page, and the ranking is calculated from them rather than copied from another list. Where a figure is genuinely disputed, the page for that place says so.
How many entries are on this list?
This list shows 20, ordered by real figures from the datasets named at the bottom of the page.
Where these numbers come from
Areas, coastlines and neighbours from the ISO 3166 dataset; population from the World Bank (2018); mountain and river figures checked individually. Ranks are calculated, not copied.
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