The smallest countries in the world

Vatican City and Monaco are unusually small even within this group. Together their land areas amount to just 2.524 km². The next entry, Nauru, has 20 km² in the selected series. Moving only a few positions down the table therefore multiplies the land footprint considerably.

The first ten include European microstates as well as island countries in the Pacific, Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean. San Marino and Liechtenstein show that a small state need not be an island. The Maldives and Marshall Islands show why an archipelago’s scattered extent at sea can look much larger on a map than its combined dry land.

Area figures for very small countries are especially sensitive to rounding. This source records some island areas in tens of square kilometres, while Monaco’s observation has finer precision. The display preserves what the source supplies; an extra decimal place would not make a rounded input more accurate. The comparisons below use these reported footprints rather than treating the locator-map sizes as proportional.

Map thumbnails often make countries look similar in size because each outline fills its own frame. Here, the squares use a shared area scale. Doubling a square’s width multiplies its area by four, so square-root scaling is essential for an honest comparison.

The ten smallest countries together occupy 1,330.524 km² in these source records. That is a calculation from the selected areas, not a measurement of one continuous place: their land is scattered across Europe, the Pacific, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.