At 923,768 km² (356,669 sq mi), Nigeria is the 31st-largest country in the world and the 14th-largest in Africa: a little more than twice the size of California, about a third bigger than Texas and nearly four times the size of the United Kingdom. In area it is a middle-ranking country, close to Tanzania and Venezuela. What makes it stand out is the number of people living there: more than 242 million by a 2026 estimate, the most of any African country and the sixth-most in the world, which gives Nigeria a population density far higher than other large African states.
923,768 km² Broken Down: Land, Water and an 853 km Coast
Of Nigeria's total area, about 910,770 km² is land and about 13,000 km² is inland water, mostly the Niger and Benue rivers, their reservoirs and the Nigerian share of Lake Chad. Most world tables give the total as 923,768 km², while some African rankings use a slightly different 924,768 km²; the gap of 1,000 km² does not change Nigeria's rank.
The country lies between latitudes 4° and 14° N and longitudes 2° and 15° E. That frame is about 1,100 km from north to south and about 1,400 km from west to east at the latitude of Abuja, so Nigeria is wider than it is tall, with a compact shape and no long panhandles. Its southern edge is a coastline of at least 853 km on the Gulf of Guinea, running from the lagoons west of Lagos past the Niger Delta to the estuary of the Cross River near Calabar. The whole country uses one time zone, West Africa Time, one hour ahead of UTC.
Within that frame the land rises from mangrove coast and rainforest in the south, through a broad belt of savanna, to the semi-arid Sahel along the Niger border. The highest point is Chappal Waddi, 2,419 m (7,936 ft), on the Mambilla Plateau in Taraba State, near the Cameroon border on the edge of Gashaka-Gumti National Park. It is also the highest point in West Africa.
Those 10 degrees of latitude are enough to hold several climate belts. The far south has a tropical rainforest climate with very little seasonal change in temperature: Warri, in the Delta, varies only between about 26 °C and 28 °C from its coolest to its warmest month. Moving north, annual rainfall falls from 1,500 to 2,000 mm in the southern rainforest to between 500 and 1,500 mm across the savanna, which itself grades from Guinean forest-savanna mosaic through Sudan savanna to patches of Sahel savanna in the north-east.
Four Land Neighbours and 4,047 km of Borders
Nigeria's land borders total 4,047 km, and almost all of that length is shared with just two countries. Cameroon runs along the whole eastern side, from the Bakassi coast to Lake Chad, and Niger covers most of the north.
The 87 km Chad border lies in Lake Chad itself, which once covered about 28,000 km² in the 19th century but has shrunk dramatically through climate change and the diversion of its water by people. The lake meets the borders of four countries, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, and its catchment area exceeds 1,000,000 km², more than Nigeria's entire territory.
Nigeria Next to California, Texas, Britain and Its Peers
Here is how Nigeria measures against places of a known size:
- California (423,970 km²) fits into Nigeria about 2.2 times.
- Texas (695,662 km²) is about three-quarters of Nigeria's size; Nigeria is roughly 33% larger.
- New Mexico (314,915 km²) would fit into Nigeria almost three times.
- The United Kingdom (244,376 km²) fits about 3.8 times, and Germany (357,581 km²) about 2.6 times.
- Venezuela (912,050 km²) is only about 11,700 km² smaller, and Tanzania (947,303 km²) about 23,500 km² larger, which puts Nigeria between them in the world ranking.
Within Africa, Nigeria is clearly smaller than the giants. Algeria (2,381,741 km²) is about 2.6 times larger, and Mali, beyond Niger to the north-west, covers 1,240,192 km². Egypt (about 1,001,450 km²) is slightly larger too, while Namibia and Mozambique, ranked just below Nigeria in Africa, are roughly 100,000 to 125,000 km² smaller.
Lagos to Maiduguri: What 1,227 km Looks Like on the Ground
One of the longest journeys across Nigeria runs from Lagos in the south-west to Maiduguri in the north-east, about 1,227 km in a straight line and much longer by road. Sokoto, in the far north-west, is about 960 km from Calabar in the south-east. Abuja, which replaced Lagos as the capital on 12 December 1991, was chosen partly because it sits near the centre: about 536 km from Lagos, 345 km from Kano and 464 km from Calabar.
That distance takes a traveller through very different country. Parts of the Niger Delta receive over 4,000 mm of rain a year, while the far north gets only 500 mm or less and feels the dusty Harmattan wind from the Sahara between December and March. In between lie the Jos Plateau, covered in our Jos Plateau guide, and the long valleys of the country's two great rivers.
The Niger enters from the north-west and the Benue, about 1,400 km long, from Cameroon in the east; the Benue's basin alone covers 319,000 km², an area about a third the size of Nigeria. Their valleys form a Y shape across the middle of the map and meet at Lokoja, the capital of Kogi State, about 160 km south-west of Abuja. From there the combined river flows south to the Niger Delta, which as officially defined covers more than 70,000 km² across nine southern states.
In the far east, the land climbs again, as it does on a smaller scale in the rugged highland south-west of the Niger and on the Obudu Plateau in Cross River State in the south-east. The Mambilla Plateau, Nigeria's highest, is about 96 km long and 40 km wide, ringed by escarpments up to about 900 m high. It averages about 1,600 m and covers more than 9,389 km², and Gashaka-Gumti National Park, Nigeria's largest at about 6,402 km², rises from 457 m in its northern savanna to the summit of Chappal Waddi. Further south, near the Cameroon border, the forests around Calabar belong to the Cross-Sanaga-Bioko coastal forests, home to the drill, a primate found in the wild only there and in neighbouring Cameroon.
36 States, the FCT and More Than 240 Million People
Nigeria's 923,768 km² is divided into 36 states plus the Federal Capital Territory around Abuja, which was carved out in 1976 from parts of the old Kaduna, Kwara, Niger and Plateau states, most of it from Niger State. Decree No. 6 of 4 February 1976 started the move of the capital from Lagos, building began under President Shehu Shagari in 1979, and the government moved in 1991. The states vary in size by a factor of more than twenty. Our article on how many states Nigeria has lists them all.
The largest states are in the north, where the savanna is wide and settlement thinner. Niger State, which holds Kainji Lake, the reservoir formed on the Niger in 1968, covers 76,363 km². The Kainji Dam, built between 1964 and 1968 for about 209 million US dollars, a quarter of which went on resettling the people whose land was flooded, supplies electricity to Nigeria's large cities, and Kainji National Park, established in 1978 and taking in part of the lake, covers about 5,341 km² of Niger and Kwara states. Borno, around Maiduguri and the Lake Chad shore, covers 70,898 km². Lagos State, at 3,577 km², is the smallest, yet it contains the country's largest city and main port.
Population is what turns a mid-sized country into a crowded one. The last full census, in 2006, counted 140,431,790 people, already about 152 per km². The CIA World Factbook's estimate for 2026 is 242,747,130, which works out at roughly 260 people per km². That is about 17 times the density of Saudi Arabia and more than ten times that of Mali, two countries with larger areas. For the latest figures and how they are estimated, see our page on the population of Nigeria.
Bakassi and the Northern Cameroons: How Nigeria's Borders Shifted
Nigeria's borders have shifted twice since independence on 1 October 1960, both times along the Cameroon frontier. In a UN referendum on 11 February 1961, the Muslim-majority Northern Cameroons, a British-administered trust territory, voted by about 60% to join Nigeria, and on 1 June 1961 it became Sardauna Province of Northern Nigeria. That land now forms parts of Borno, Adamawa and Taraba states. The Southern Cameroons voted to join Cameroon instead.
The second change went the other way. After a judgment of the International Court of Justice, Nigeria handed the Bakassi peninsula, a mangrove-covered area of about 665 km² at the eastern end of the Gulf of Guinea, to Cameroon in stages, completing the transfer on 14 August 2008. The Nigerian Senate had rejected the handover in 2007, but the transfer went ahead under the Greentree Agreement, and Bakassi is now governed by Cameroon. The loss was small in area, under 0.1% of the national total, but it placed a population variously estimated at 150,000 to 300,000 people, living in one of the richest fishing grounds on the coast, under Cameroonian administration. Each of the frontiers that define today's 923,768 km² is described in our guide to the countries that border Nigeria.