20 Countries Bigger Than South Korea — And Only 2 Smaller

Of the 22 countries WhatsThePop tracks, exactly two are smaller than South Korea (100,210 km²): the Netherlands (41,850 km²) and Switzerland (41,284 km²) — a difference of just 566 km², practically a rounding error. The other 20 are all bigger, and five of them are more than 70 times the size.

That said, this isn't a ranking against all 195 countries on Earth — it's a comparison within the 22 the site actually covers, which skews toward large, well-known destinations. Read the list with that selection bias in mind.

The countries below aren't just listed by multiplier. Past 70×, the ratio itself stops meaning anything, and at the other end, a country like Iceland — barely 1.03× Korea's size — turns out to have a population under 1% of Korea's, so the on-the-ground experience has nothing to do with the area figure. Grouped by scale, with what actually matters in each range.

Canada through Australia — five countries clear 70×. Canada (9.98M km²) is 99.6× Korea's size, China (9.71M km²) 96.9×, the United States (9.37M km²) 93.5×, Brazil (8.52M km²) 85.0×, Australia (7.69M km²) 76.8× — beyond this point the ratio itself becomes unreadable.

Canada and Australia share something else, too: population density so low that most of that land sits empty, which is where land area and livable area diverge the most.

India (3.29M km², 32.8×), Mexico (1.96M km², 19.6×), Indonesia (1.90M km², 19.0×), Egypt (1.00M km², exactly 10.0×). These are countries most people could name without being able to guess their size.

Indonesia is the hardest to picture on a map — spread across more than 17,000 islands, it's not one connected landmass the way Canada is. No domestic flight or ferry, no crossing it.

Familiar travel destinations cluster in this range. Turkey (783,562 km²) is 7.8× Korea's size, France (551,695 km²) 5.5×, Thailand (513,120 km²) 5.1×, Spain (505,992 km²) 5.1× — all four are big enough that crossing the country usually means catching a domestic flight, not renting a car. Thailand alone takes a full day overland from Chiang Mai in the north to Phuket in the south.

The Philippines and Vietnam get filed under "nearby Southeast Asia" in most Korean travelers' heads, which makes it easy to assume they're roughly Korea-sized. They're not — Japan (377,930 km², 3.8×), Germany (357,114 km², 3.6×), the Philippines (342,353 km², 3.4×), Vietnam (331,212 km², 3.3×), and Italy (301,336 km², 3.0×) are all more than triple.

The United Kingdom (242,900 km²) is 2.4× Korea's size, and Iceland (103,000 km²) is just 1.03× — the closest area match among all 22 countries. But similar area doesn't mean similar country: Iceland's population is around 390,000, under 1% of Korea's. Nearly identical land, population density more than 100× apart.

And among the countries this site covers, the only two smaller than Korea are the Netherlands (41,850 km²) and Switzerland (41,284 km²) — a 566 km² gap that's suspiciously close for two unrelated countries. Worth noting about the Netherlands specifically: that number isn't fixed. A meaningful share of its land was reclaimed from the sea over centuries of dike and polder engineering, so "original size" means something different there than it does anywhere else on this list.

Each country's detail page lets you re-run this comparison against wherever you're actually from. If population gaps are more your thing, the report comparing India and Vatican City covers the same idea at the other extreme. All area figures here are current as of July 2026.