How is square miles calculated from square kilometres?

One square kilometre equals about 0.386102 square miles, so the tool multiplies the km² value by that factor. Equivalently you can divide km² by 2.58999 to get mi².

Does the area include water or only land?

The figures shown are total area, which includes inland water such as large lakes and rivers as well as land. Land-only area is slightly smaller for countries with significant inland water bodies.

Which is the largest and smallest country?

Russia is by far the largest at about 17.1 million km², roughly 11 percent of the world's land. Vatican City is the smallest sovereign state at about 0.44 km², small enough to walk across in minutes.

Why do some area figures differ between sources?

Different agencies measure total versus land area, include or exclude disputed territories and dependencies, and round differently. Variations of a percent or two between this reference and another are normal.

How big is a square kilometre in everyday terms?

A square kilometre is 100 hectares, or about 247 acres, roughly the area of 140 full-size football pitches. It is a convenient unit for country-scale comparisons where square metres would be unwieldy.

Country Area Reference

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Country area reference

This reference lists the total area of countries in both square kilometres and square miles, so you can answer “how big is this country?” and compare sizes at a glance. It spans the full range from Russia, the largest state on Earth, down to the tiny European micro-states.

How it works

Each country has a stored total area in km². The tool converts to square miles with a fixed factor:

area_mi2 = area_km2 × 0.386102

Total area includes inland water (large lakes and rivers), not just dry land, which is the convention most atlases use. Sorting by area ranks countries by size; sorting by name gives an alphabetical lookup. Because agencies differ on whether to count disputed regions or dependencies, figures are accurate to about a percent rather than exact to the last hectare.

Tips and example

Russia covers about 17.1 million km² (≈6.6 million mi²) — larger than the entire continent of Antarctica and about 1.7 times the size of Canada.
To sanity-check the conversion: 1,000,000 km² × 0.386102 ≈ 386,102 mi², which matches the per-country values shown.
The smallest sovereign states (Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino) are fractions of a km² and are best understood in hectares rather than square miles.
Use km² for international and scientific contexts and mi² for US-facing material; the tool shows both to avoid manual conversion errors.