Ten country pairs with nearly equal mapped area

The search covers 5,671 unordered pairs. For each pair, we subtract the smaller polygon area from the larger and divide by the larger area. We sort with unrounded values; the displayed percentage is rounded only after ranking. A small number means these two mapped estimates are close, not that their official land areas are identical.

In this dataset, the United Kingdom and Ghana differ by only 45 km². That tiny gap is a useful warning about precision: Natural Earth’s 1:50m boundaries are made for world maps, not for settling a country-area tie to the nearest square kilometre. A different coastline, island set, border convention or land-versus-water definition could change the order. We do not have a measurement uncertainty for each polygon, so we cannot say how likely a reversal is.

Madagascar and Kenya, Poland and Oman, and other pairs in the table show the same principle at different latitudes. Their projected outlines can look unlike each other even where their measured areas nearly match. Open a pair in Equal Earth to compare drawn area, then switch to Mercator to see the projection change. The fixed numbers in the panel remain the same.

The 100,000 km² threshold keeps tiny map features from dominating the list; it is an editorial filter, not a geographic category. The search includes territories and uses the names in the map file. It excludes Antarctica, as does our area index. Readers looking for official land-area near ties should choose one statistical source and recompute the pairs from that source instead.

Our calculations use Natural Earth 1:50m Admin 0 Countries. The area guide explains how a polygon estimate differs from land and total surface area, and the Mercator guide quantifies why equal-area pairs need not look equal on a familiar world map.