Canada has by far the longest coastline of any country, commonly measured at about 202,000 kilometres — and at roughly 243,000 kilometres when every island shore is included. Norway, Indonesia, Greenland, Russia, the Philippines, Japan, Australia, the United States and New Zealand complete the usual top ten. Every figure in that list depends on the measuring method, and no two authorities agree.
The Top Ten by Measured Coastline
Using the widely cited CIA World Factbook figures, the ranking runs roughly as follows:
- Canada — about 202,080 km
- Norway — about 58,133 km (including fjords and islands)
- Indonesia — about 54,720 km
- Greenland (an autonomous territory of Denmark) — about 44,087 km
- Russia — about 37,653 km
- Philippines — about 36,289 km
- Japan — about 29,751 km
- Australia — about 25,760 km
- United States — about 19,924 km
- Antarctica — about 17,968 km (no sovereign state)
- New Zealand — about 15,134 km
The gap at the top is extraordinary. Canada's measured coastline is longer than the next four countries combined, and roughly ten times that of the United States despite the two sharing a continent.
Note also what the list does not track. Australia is the sixth-largest country on Earth by area but ranks eighth here; Russia is the largest country of all and ranks fifth. Coastline length and land area are only loosely related.
Why Canada's Figure Is So Enormous
Three factors compound.
First, Canada borders three oceans — the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Arctic — and the Arctic frontage alone is immense. Second, the Canadian Arctic Archipelago contains something on the order of 36,000 islands, including Baffin Island, Victoria Island and Ellesmere Island, each of which is itself among the largest islands in the world and each contributing its full perimeter to the total. Third, the coasts are extraordinarily convoluted: the fjords of Baffin Island and the drowned glacial landscapes of Labrador and British Columbia produce shorelines that double back on themselves endlessly.
Glaciation is the underlying cause. During the last glacial maximum, ice sheets carved deep valleys that were subsequently flooded as sea levels rose, converting a relatively simple continental margin into a maze of inlets, sounds and channels. Norway ranks second for exactly the same reason at a smaller scale — its fjords and its skerry belt of tens of thousands of small islands inflate a modest-looking country's figure past Indonesia's.
Canada's Arctic frontage carries a political dimension as well as a geographic one. The Northwest Passage threads through the archipelago, and Canada regards those channels as internal waters while the United States and several other states treat them as an international strait. As Arctic sea ice thins and the route becomes more navigable, a coastline statistic that once looked like trivia has turned into a live question of sovereignty and shipping regulation.
The Coastline Paradox: Why No Two Sources Agree
The single most important thing to understand about coastline rankings is that coastline length is not a fixed physical quantity. It depends on the length of the ruler used.
This was formalised by Lewis Fry Richardson, who noticed that published estimates of the Spain–Portugal border differed by around 20 per cent depending on the source, and later developed by Benoit Mandelbrot in his 1967 paper "How Long Is the Coast of Britain?", which became a founding text of fractal geometry. The insight: as you shorten the measuring interval, you capture progressively smaller bays, headlands and rock features, and the measured length grows without converging on a limit.
The practical consequences are stark. The CIA World Factbook gives Canada about 202,000 km; the Canadian government's own figure, counting island shores at higher resolution, is about 243,000 km. The United Kingdom is variously quoted between 12,000 and 19,000 km. Estimates for the United States range from under 20,000 km to well over 130,000 km once tidal shorelines, bays and estuaries are included at fine resolution — the figure the NOAA tidal shoreline measurement produces.
Norway offers the clearest illustration of the paradox in a single country. Measured along its outer mainland edge, ignoring fjords and islands, Norway's coast runs only about 2,500 kilometres — the straight-line length of the country. Follow every fjord to its head and trace the perimeter of every skerry, and the figure exceeds 58,000 kilometres, more than twenty times larger. Both numbers are correct; they answer different questions.
So the correct way to read any coastline table is comparatively, within a single consistent dataset, and never by mixing figures from different sources. A country that "overtakes" another between two lists has usually done nothing but change measurement scale.
Archipelago Nations Punch Above Their Size
Island countries dominate the upper reaches of the ranking relative to their land area. Indonesia comprises some 17,000 islands and the Philippines over 7,600; both therefore accumulate vast perimeters from relatively modest territory. Japan's roughly 14,000 islands, counted at modern resolution, give it a longer coastline than Australia, a country about twenty times its size.
The most extreme cases by ratio are small island states. The Maldives, Seychelles, the Bahamas and Micronesia have tiny land areas and coastline-to-area ratios orders of magnitude above continental states. Every one of their citizens lives near the sea by definition, which is why sea-level rise is an existential rather than economic question for them.
The reverse extreme is instructive too. Russia has an enormous Arctic coast but a very smooth one along much of the Siberian margin, and much of it is ice-bound for large parts of the year, so its access-per-kilometre is far lower than the raw figure implies. Length alone says nothing about usability. Related reading: countries with the most islands.
Coastline shape also drives hazard exposure in ways the ranking hides. Low, smooth, densely settled coasts — Bangladesh's delta frontage, much of the US Gulf coast, the Netherlands — carry far greater storm-surge and flooding risk per kilometre than the steep rock coasts of Norway or British Columbia, even though the latter measure vastly longer. Length is a poor proxy for vulnerability, and an even poorer one for how many people actually live by the sea.
Coastline Length vs Exclusive Economic Zone
For most practical purposes — fishing rights, seabed minerals, offshore energy, maritime jurisdiction — the meaningful measure is not coastline length but Exclusive Economic Zone, the area extending up to 200 nautical miles from a country's baselines under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. On that measure the ranking reshuffles dramatically.
France holds one of the largest EEZs in the world, on the order of 11 million square kilometres, almost entirely because of scattered overseas territories in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans — French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Réunion, the Kerguelen Islands and others. The United States is comparable, thanks to Alaska, Hawaii and its Pacific territories. Australia, Russia and the United Kingdom also rank far higher by EEZ than by coastline.
Canada, the runaway coastline leader, ranks well down the EEZ table. Its coastline is long because it is convoluted, but convoluted coasts generate overlapping 200-mile arcs that add little new area. A single remote island in open ocean, by contrast, generates a full circular zone of roughly 430,000 square kilometres. This is precisely why sovereignty over tiny uninhabited rocks is disputed so fiercely in the South China Sea and elsewhere — the rock is worthless, the zone around it is not.
Landlocked at the Other Extreme
Forty-four countries have no coastline at all. Two — Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein — are doubly landlocked, meaning every neighbouring country is also landlocked, so reaching the sea requires crossing at least two borders.
The economic penalty is measurable. Landlocked developing countries face systematically higher trade costs, because goods must cross additional borders, incur transit fees, and depend on the infrastructure and political stability of neighbours. Bolivia has pursued its lost Pacific access through international courts for well over a century; Ethiopia, with over 100 million people, became landlocked when Eritrea gained independence in 1993 and routes the large majority of its trade through Djibouti.
The exceptions prove the rule rather than break it. Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg are wealthy despite being landlocked, but all sit inside a dense, stable, high-quality European transport network with excellent river and rail access — conditions unavailable to landlocked states in Central Asia or the Sahel.
Reading Coastline Tables Carefully
A short checklist for using any of these numbers:
- Check whether islands are included. This alone can double or triple a figure for archipelago states.
- Check the source and stick to it. Never rank countries using figures drawn from different datasets.
- Check whether territories are counted. Greenland appears in some lists as a separate entry and is folded into Denmark in others, which moves Denmark from near the bottom of European rankings to near the top.
- Treat precision as spurious. A figure quoted to the nearest kilometre implies an accuracy that the coastline paradox makes meaningless.
For related comparisons, see our pages on the largest countries by area and the Canada country guide, or test how well you can place the world's coastlines in our geography games.
