Countries With the Most Lakes: Canada’s Lead, Tanzania’s Surprise

Counting the world’s great lakes, those larger than about 3,000 km², Canada has the most with 17, followed by Russia with 8 and the United States with 6, according to the table of large lakes compiled from the Encyclopedia of Inland Waters (Likens, 2009). Canada also leads on every national count of small lakes: its lakes of 10 hectares or more number at least 880,000, and some estimates put its total above 2 million, more than any other country.

Nobody has counted every pond on Earth country by country with one method. Finland counts lakes down to 500 m², Sweden down to about 0.8 hectares and Canada down to 10 hectares, so their totals cannot be ranked against each other. The table below therefore uses a count anyone can check: lakes with a surface area above roughly 3,000 km², excluding reservoirs, coastal lagoons and seasonal lakes. A lake shared by several countries counts once for each country on its shore, which is why the Caspian Sea appears under five flags and Lake Tanganyika under four.

The expected leaders: Canada, Russia and the United States

Canada’s 17 giants and its 880,000 smaller lakes

Canada’s lead is not close on any measure. Of the 47 lakes in the table worldwide, 17 touch Canadian territory, and 12 of those lie entirely inside the country. Great Bear Lake, straddling the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories, covers 31,153 km² and is the largest lake wholly within Canada; only Lake Superior and Lake Huron, which it shares with the United States, are bigger. Great Slave Lake (27,200 km²) and Lake Winnipeg (24,514 km²) follow, then a long tail that includes Athabasca, Reindeer, Winnipegosis, Nipigon, Manitoba and Dubawnt. On Baffin Island, Nettilling Lake, at 5,542 km², is the largest lake on any island in the world.

The small lakes explain the reputation even better than the big ones. Canada has an estimated 31,752 lakes larger than 3 km² and 563 larger than 100 km². Counting down to 10 hectares gives about 880,000, and estimates that include smaller water bodies reach 2 million. The reason is the Canadian Shield, the ancient core of North America, which ice sheets scraped down to bare Precambrian rock. The glaciers left a thin skin of soil, gouged hollows and a jumbled, “deranged” drainage pattern in which water collects in countless basins instead of draining neatly to the sea. The Atlas of Canada puts lake cover at 8.9 per cent of the country.

Russia and the United States, second and third

Russia’s eight are fewer than its size might suggest, but they include the most remarkable lake on the planet. Lake Baikal in southern Siberia covers 31,722 km², reaches a maximum depth of 1,642 m and holds about 23,615 km³ of water, roughly 22 to 23 per cent of the world’s fresh surface water and more than all five North American Great Lakes combined. At 25 to 30 million years old it is also the oldest lake known. Russia also shares the Caspian Sea, which at about 389,000 km² including the Garabogazköl lagoon is the largest lake of all. In the northwest, Lake Ladoga (17,700 km²) is the largest lake in Europe and Lake Onega (9,700 km²) the second. Lake Taymyr sits in the Arctic, Lake Khanka is shared with China, Lake Peipus with Estonia, and the northeastern tip of Uvs Lake, which lies mostly in Mongolia, falls inside Russia’s Tuva Republic.

The United States counts six because it shares four Great Lakes with Canada and owns a fifth outright. Lake Superior, at 82,100 km², is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area; Lake Michigan (about 57,800 km²) is the only Great Lake entirely within the United States. Lake of the Woods, on the Minnesota–Ontario border, is the sixth. The Atlas of Canada credits the Great Lakes system with 18 per cent of the world’s fresh water. Utah’s Great Salt Lake would be larger than several entries, but it is excluded because its area swings so much from year to year.

Tanzania, Kazakhstan and Zambia: the unexpected entries

Tanzania in fourth, courtesy of the East African Rift

The first genuinely unexpected name is Tanzania, a country of about 947,000 km² that outranks China and Brazil. It touches three of the world’s ten largest lakes. Tanzania holds 49 per cent of Lake Victoria (about 33,700 km²), the largest lake in Africa and the largest tropical lake anywhere, with Uganda taking 45 per cent and Kenya 6 per cent. It holds 46 per cent of Lake Tanganyika, the world’s longest freshwater lake and the second deepest after Baikal. On its southwest border it faces Lake Malawi, also called Lake Nyasa; Tanzania says the boundary runs down the middle of the lake, while Malawi claims all of the surface outside Mozambique’s waters and currently administers it.

The fourth is Lake Rukwa, a closed, alkaline lake that sits in a parallel branch of the rift between Tanganyika and Malawi. Its size swings with the rains: it was only about 48 km long in 1929, about 128 km in 1939, and today measures roughly 180 km by 32 km, or about 5,760 km². The same tectonic forces that split East Africa explain the whole cluster. Rift valleys form long, deep troughs, and water fills them; that is why DR Congo, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, none of them famous as lake countries, also make the top 12.

China, Kazakhstan and Zambia, tied in fifth

China’s three are an odd mix. Qinghai Lake, an alkaline salt lake on the Tibetan Plateau, is the largest lake in China and has been growing again since 2004 after shrinking for much of the 20th century. Poyang Lake in Jiangxi is the country’s largest freshwater lake, but its area swings sharply between wet and dry seasons, averaging about 3,500 km² in a normal year. Lake Khanka, on the border with Russia’s Far East, completes the set.

Kazakhstan’s trio shows how fragile a lake count can be. It shares the Caspian, and it holds Lake Balkhash, about 16,400 km² and shrinking as water is diverted and extracted from the rivers that feed it, chiefly the Ili. Its third is the North Aral Sea, only about 3,300 km², the remnant of a lake that covered 68,000 km² before Soviet irrigation diverted its rivers in the 1960s. Kazakhstan’s Kokaral dike, finished in 2005, raised the northern basin’s level by 12 m between 2003 and 2008 and kept it on the list. Zambia’s three are Tanganyika, Lake Mweru on the border with DR Congo (5,120 km²) and Lake Bangweulu, whose open water of about 3,000 km² sits right at the threshold inside some 15,000 km² of wetland.

Finland and Sweden: famous lake countries with one giant each

The best-known near-misses are the two Nordic states that every lake quiz mentions. Finland counts 187,888 lakes larger than 500 m², about 5,600 of them above 10 hectares and 309 above 10 km². But only one, Saimaa in the Finnish Lakeland, clears the 3,000 km² mark, at roughly 4,300 km²; the rest is a maze of basins such as Pihlajavesi, Haukivesi and Orivesi linked by narrow channels. Sweden has 22,600 lakes larger than 0.1 km² and more than 97,500 above about 0.8 hectares, but again only Vänern, at 5,650 km² the largest lake in the European Union, makes the table.

Both countries were shaped by the same ice as Canada, and by density of lakes they are among the richest on Earth; you can read more about how the ice sheets left Finland’s basins in our guide to Finland’s geography. Their problem in this ranking is size. Finland is about 338,000 km² in total, about a thirtieth of Canada, so a landscape of many small lakes simply has no room for many giant ones.

Brazil, Australia and Norway: the big names with no great lakes

Several countries that dominate other water rankings score zero. Brazil, the fifth-largest country on Earth, has the Amazon but no natural lake above 3,000 km² in the table. Its largest standing water body, Lagoa dos Patos in Rio Grande do Sul, covers 10,100 km², but it is a coastal lagoon separated from the Atlantic by a sandbar about 8 km wide, and its waters rise and fall with the tides, so it is excluded. Australia’s largest, Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, can spread to 9,500 km², yet it is usually a salt pan and filled completely only three times between 1860 and 2025.

Norway is the fjord country, not the lake country. Its biggest lake, Mjøsa, north of Oslo, is about 369 km², one-eighth of the threshold, even though its greatest depth of 453 m takes its floor far below sea level. India, Argentina and Chile also have no lake in the table. At the other extreme, a few single-lake countries punch above their weight: Kyrgyzstan with Issyk-Kul (6,236 km²), Nicaragua with Lake Nicaragua (8,264 km²), Turkey with Lake Van and Bolivia and Peru, which share Titicaca (8,372 km²).

The ranking shifts a little depending on the threshold, but not at the top: whether you count lakes of 10 hectares or 3,000 km², Canada comes first. For a closer look at the continent’s second-largest example, see our guide to Great Bear Lake, and for how North America’s giants compare with Africa’s rift lakes, read the Great Lakes versus the African Great Lakes.