Geographical maps often shape our understanding of the world. But this tells us nothing about where in the world people live. To understand this, we need to look at population density.
Population density is a measure of how densely populated an area is. It is calculated by dividing the total population of an area by its total land area.
The map shows the number of people per square kilometer (km2) across the world.
Globally, the average population density is 62 people per km² in 2023, but there are very large differences across countries.
Many of the world’s small islands or isolated states have large populations for their size. The five most densely populated are Macao, Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Gibraltar. Singapore has 8,480 people per km² – more than 200 times as dense as the United States and 2,000 times as Australia.
Of the larger countries1, Bangladesh is the most densely populated, with 1,330 people per km². This is almost three times as dense as its neighbor, India. It’s followed by Rwanda (571), South Korea (531), Lebanon (523), and the Netherlands (523).
You can see the world’s least densely populated countries if you hover your mouse over the brackets from 0 to 10 on the legend. Greenland is the least dense, with around 0.1 people per km², followed by Mongolia, Namibia, Australia, and Iceland.
If we want to understand how people are distributed across the world, another useful tool is the population cartogram: a geographical presentation of the world where the size of the countries is not drawn according to the distribution of land, but according to the distribution of people.
We show elsewhere how the world looks in this way. When we see a standard map, we focus on the largest countries by area. But these are not always where the greatest number of people live. It’s this context we need if we want to understand how the lives of people around the world are changing.
