World Population Density Map

This world population density map shows where Earth’s roughly 8.2 billion people actually live. The first map plots a 1 km population grid, so cities, river valleys and empty deserts show up inside each country; the second, above the full ranking, colours every country by its average people per km². Monaco is the most densely populated country at 19,044 people per km², Bangladesh the densest large one at 1,366, and Mongolia the emptiest at 2.3, against a world average of about 61 per km² of land.

Which countries are the most densely populated?

The top of the ranking belongs to places too small to show at world scale. Monaco fits 38,087 people into about 2 km², Singapore 5.9 million into 710 km² (8,225 per km²), and the island states of Bahrain, the Maldives and Malta all pass 1,700 per km². Two Chinese special administrative regions sit beside them: Macau, at 21,981 per km², is denser than any country, and Hong Kong runs to 7,027.

Among countries with more than ten million people, Bangladesh stands alone. Its 177.8 million people share 147,600 km², an area close to that of the US state of Iowa, for 1,366 per km² — more than double the next large country, Taiwan (636). Rwanda (604), Burundi (574), the Netherlands (548), South Korea (529) and India (497) follow. Our guide to the most densely populated countries looks at why each of them got that way.

Where the map is emptiest

Greenland is the emptiest place on the map: 55,629 people on 2.2 million km², or 0.14 per km², almost all of them along the ice-free west coast. The Falkland Islands manage 0.28. Among sovereign states, Mongolia (2.3) is the least dense, followed by Australia (3.5), Namibia (3.8), Iceland (4.0), Suriname (4.1), Guyana and Libya (4.3 each) and Canada (4.5).

Mongolia’s low average hides a single dominant city: about half of its 3.5 million people live in and around Ulaanbaatar. On the grid map, the Sahara, the Arabian interior, Siberia, the Canadian Shield and the Australian outback stay almost entirely unshaded: by the GHSL estimate, 90% of all people live on just 8% of the land outside Antarctica, and half of humanity fits on about 1% (measured on this map’s 5 km cells). The least densely populated countries are mostly desert, ice or rainforest.

Why a national average hides most of the story

A country’s density is its population divided by its whole area, so it says nothing about how evenly people are spread. Egypt averages 121 per km², a middling figure, but the grid shows the reality: 95% of its 114 million people live on just 3.4% of the country — the Nile valley, the delta and the Suez Canal cities — while the Western and Eastern deserts are close to empty.

The same pattern repeats in the largest countries. About 76% of Russians live west of 60°E, roughly the line of the Urals, and 95% of them occupy about 3% of its land. Roughly 80% of Canadians live south of the 50th parallel, and 95% on about 2% of the country. Australia is more extreme still: 90% of its people live on about half of one percent of the continent, mostly in a handful of coastal cities. That is why this page has two maps: the grid answers “where do people live?”, while the country map answers “how crowded is each country on average?”.

Density is not the same as population

India and China have almost the same number of people — 1.48 billion and 1.41 billion — but China has nearly three times the area, so India’s density (497 per km²) is more than three times China’s (150). The United States, the third most populous country, averages just 38 per km², less than a sixth of Germany (239) and a fourteenth of the Netherlands (548).

If you want the raw headcounts and areas side by side, the Population & Area resource lists both for every country, and our population density by country article breaks it down by region and explains what drives it. Density peaks far higher inside cities than in any country — the most crowded 5 km cell on the grid, in central Dhaka, holds about 94,000 people per km². See the most densely populated cities for how Manila and Mumbai compare.

About the data

Country figures are World Population Review’s 2026 estimates, measured against each country’s total area. Kosovo, which that table omits, uses its 2024 census (1,586,659 people on 10,887 km², 146 per km²). Shapes the atlas draws separately but which are counted inside another country — Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Åland, Norfolk Island, and Christmas and Cocos Islands — show that country’s figure. Antarctica and a handful of islands with no permanent population are marked as such.

The grid map is the European Commission’s Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-POP R2023A) for 2025, which spreads census counts onto 1 km cells using satellite-mapped buildings. It is summed here into cells about 5 km across, so a single city block will not appear, and the “around this spot” figure in the tooltip averages a roughly 25 km square. Both maps use the same colour scale.

Population density by country