List
The 20 countries with the fewest people
Vatican City tops this list with 825. Tuvalu comes second. Here are the top 20, each one a link to its own page.
| # | Name | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vatican City | 825 |
| 2 | Tuvalu | 12 000 |
| 3 | Nauru | 13 000 |
| 4 | Palau | 18 000 |
| 5 | San Marino | 34 000 |
| 6 | Liechtenstein | 38 000 |
| 7 | Monaco | 39 000 |
| 8 | Saint Kitts and Nevis | 52 000 |
| 9 | Marshall Islands | 58 000 |
| 10 | Dominica | 72 000 |
| 11 | Andorra | 77 000 |
| 12 | Antigua and Barbuda | 96 000 |
| 13 | Seychelles | 97 000 |
| 14 | Tonga | 103 000 |
| 15 | Saint Vincent and the Grenadines | 110 000 |
| 16 | Grenada | 111 000 |
| 17 | Micronesia | 113 000 |
| 18 | Kiribati | 116 000 |
| 19 | Saint Lucia | 182 000 |
| 20 | Samoa | 196 000 |
What is being measured here
Population counts everybody living in a country, whatever passport they hold. Nobody counts every person on a single day, so these are careful estimates from the World Bank, and the newest complete set available offline is from 2018. That is why the pages say “about” rather than giving an exact number.
The two ends of this list are further apart than they look: the figure for Vatican City is about 238 times the one for Samoa — and Samoa is still in 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 countries have the fewest people?
Vatican City is first on this list with about 825 people.
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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