List
The emptiest countries in the world
Mongolia tops this list with 2 /km². Namibia comes second. Here are the top 20, each one a link to its own page.
| # | Name | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mongolia | 2 /km² |
| 2 | Namibia | 3 /km² |
| 3 | Australia | 3.2 /km² |
| 4 | Iceland | 3.4 /km² |
| 5 | Suriname | 3.5 /km² |
| 6 | Guyana | 3.6 /km² |
| 7 | Canada | 3.7 /km² |
| 8 | Libya | 3.8 /km² |
| 9 | Botswana | 3.9 /km² |
| 10 | Mauritania | 4.3 /km² |
| 11 | Kazakhstan | 6.7 /km² |
| 12 | Central African Republic | 7.5 /km² |
| 13 | Gabon | 7.9 /km² |
| 14 | Russia | 8.4 /km² |
| 15 | Bolivia | 10.3 /km² |
| 16 | Turkmenistan | 12 /km² |
| 17 | Chad | 12.1 /km² |
| 18 | Republic of the Congo | 15.3 /km² |
| 19 | Mali | 15.4 /km² |
| 20 | Oman | 15.6 /km² |
What is being measured here
Density is the population divided by the area — how many people share one square kilometre on average. Averages hide a lot: almost everyone in Egypt lives along the Nile, so the country feels crowded there and empty everywhere else, and the single number tells you neither.
The two ends of this list are further apart than they look: Mongolia is about 7.8 times the figure for Oman, and Oman 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 emptiest countrie?
Mongolia 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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