Count every island in a detailed open map of the world's shorelines and you get 181,588. Over half are rocks and islets under a tenth of a square kilometre; 23,150 are a square kilometre or more. Who has them, how big are they, and how many of us live on one?
How many islands are there in the world? It sounds like a question with an answer, and it is not. Sweden claims more than a quarter of a million, Norway and Finland boast of theirs, and Indonesia has spent years recounting its own. The number depends on what you count as an island and, above all, on how closely you look: every map smooths the coast at some scale, and each step closer adds rocks, skerries and sandbanks that the step before could not see.
So I picked one map and counted everything on it. GSHHG, the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography database, is a free shoreline of the whole world, drawn in one consistent way and detailed down to rocks of a few hundred square metres. It draws 181,588 islands: 179,823 in the sea, 1,437 in lakes and rivers and 328 around Antarctica. I gave each one a size, a country and a population from WorldPop's 2025 estimates, which put people on a one-kilometre grid. Zoom in anywhere, search a country, and click any island.
Islands from the GSHHG full-resolution shoreline (level 1 land other than the five continents, level 3 islands in lakes, and Antarctic islands), drawn as a raster at world scale and as outlines and dots close up. Click an island for its area, its rank and the people WorldPop places on it. Country from Natural Earth. Sources: GSHHG 2.3 (Wessel and Smith, LGPL-3.0); WorldPop Global 2, 2025 (CC BY 4.0); Natural Earth (public domain). Base map tiles © Esri.
Islands are overwhelmingly small. 93,998 of the 181,588 (52%) are under 0.1 km², smaller than fourteen football pitches, and together they hold less than a tenth of one per cent of the island land. 23,150 islands are 1 km² or more, 6,341 are 10 km² or more, 296 are 1,000 km² or more, and just 18 are bigger than 100,000 km², from Greenland down to Iceland. The biggest ten hold 61% of all island land, and Greenland alone 21%.
Islands by size
Number of islands in each size class, and the share of island land and island people in each. Hover for figures.
The count of small islands is a property of the map more than of the world. GSHHG comes in five resolutions, each simplified from the full one. The crudest draws 762 islands, the low 6,242, the intermediate 34,392, the high 146,510 and the full 181,588. Natural Earth's detailed 1:10 million map, the base of countless world maps, has 9,628. But look only at islands of 1 km² or more and the count settles: 22,772, 23,146 and 23,150 in the three finest GSHHG versions. Below a square kilometre, any total is mostly a statement about the ruler you used.
The count depends on the map
Islands in Natural Earth 10m and in each GSHHG resolution, all sizes and 1 km² or more.
Canada has the most islands on every measure: 29,249 of all sizes and 4,048 of 1 km² or more, from Baffin, Victoria and Ellesmere in the Arctic to the lakes and coasts of the south. Counting every rock, Greenland is next with 18,222, then Finland with 13,178 (nearly all along its coast and in the Archipelago Sea: the shoreline has few of the islands in Finland's lakes), the United States, Norway and Sweden. Counting islands of 1 km² or more, the order changes: the United States (1,652), Indonesia (1,544), Russia (1,438) and Chile (1,245). The Nordic skerries are many but tiny; the Indonesian and Chilean islands are fewer but bigger.
Islands by country or territory
Top 15. Territories such as Greenland, Åland and the Faroes count on their own, as in Natural Earth. Click a bar to see the country on the map.
Sweden's famous figure of 267,570 islands comes from a far more detailed national map than any world shoreline: GSHHG finds 10,036 Swedish islands, and just 467 of 1 km² or more. The Stockholm archipelago, the Åland islands and the Archipelago Sea off Turku alone hold 12,849 GSHHG islands, 444 of them over a square kilometre.
Leaving out the continents (Australia is the smallest of them, at more than three times Greenland's size), the largest island is Greenland at 2,113,828 km², then New Guinea (780,025 km²), Borneo, Madagascar, Baffin and Sumatra. Some are shared: New Guinea between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, Borneo between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, and Ireland, Hispaniola, Timor, Tierra del Fuego and Cyprus each between two or more. Altogether islands cover 9.9 million km², 6.6% of the world's land.
The largest islands
Area within the GSHHG coastline, including lakes. Colour: size class. Click a bar to find the island.
WorldPop's 2025 estimates put 8,187.6 million people on the grid. 841.3 million of them, 10.3%, live on islands. Three islands account for 38% of them: Java with 153.2 million people, one in every 53 people on Earth; Honshu with 100.4 million; and Great Britain with 66.8 million. Luzon, Sumatra, Madagascar, Mindanao, Borneo, Hispaniola, Sri Lanka and Taiwan follow. The ten most populous islands hold 67% of all island people.
The most populous islands
People in 2025, WorldPop. Colour: size class. Click a bar to find the island.
43 countries and territories with 100,000 people or more are entirely or almost entirely on islands (99% or more of their people), together home to 754 million. In others, islands are a large minority. In Denmark 56% of people live on islands, mostly on Zealand around Copenhagen and on Funen. In Hong Kong it is 25%, in Malaysia 21% (Borneo and Penang), Greece 16%, Canada 11% (Montreal, Vancouver Island and Newfoundland) and Italy 11% (Sicily and Sardinia).
Where the island people are
People living on islands by region, millions, 2025. Hover for the region's largest and most populous island.
Among islands of 100 km² or more, the most crowded is Xiamen Island in China, with 18,787 people per km², ahead of Singapore (10,671), Montreal (joined to Laval in this shoreline) and Staten Island. Of the islands over 1,000 km², Long Island in New York is the most crowded (2,490 per km²), then Java (1,210). At the other end, 77 islands of 1,000 km² or more have nobody on them in WorldPop's grid. The largest is Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, 55,886 km² and genuinely uninhabited. The list also shows the limits of a population model: Spitsbergen, home to the town of Longyearbyen, also comes out empty, because the settlement layer behind WorldPop misses it.
Most crowded and largest empty islands
People per km² on islands of 100 km² or more; and the largest islands with no one in WorldPop's 2025 grid.
GSHHG keeps track of what sits inside what: land, lakes on the land, islands in the lakes. 662 of its 6,658 lakes are on islands, the largest a 3,141 km² lake on Baffin Island (Amadjuak Lake; the bigger Nettilling Lake is missing from the shoreline). 23 islands sit in a lake on an island. The largest is Glover Island, 163 km² of forest in Grand Lake on Newfoundland. Then come Talim Island in Laguna de Bay and Volcano Island in Taal Lake, both on Luzon, and Isla Cabritos in Lake Enriquillo on Hispaniola. Volcano Island has a crater lake with its own islet, Vulcan Point, but the shoreline stops one level short of that.
Samosir, in Lake Toba on Sumatra, is often called the largest island within an island. In GSHHG it is not an island at all: a narrow isthmus, cut only by a canal, joins it to the lake shore. The same kind of judgement decides much bigger questions. Manhattan and Mumbai's Salsette Island are part of the mainland in this shoreline, so their people count as continental; the Island of Montreal and Laval are drawn as one.
841 million people, 10.3% of humanity, live on islands. Java alone holds more than all of North America's islands put together.
Islands. GSHHG 2.3 at full resolution (Wessel and Smith), as packaged in the basemap-data-hires Python package. Its polygons are ranked by level: 1 is land, 2 a lake, 3 an island in a lake. Every level-1 polygon except the five continents (Eurasia, Africa, North America, South America and Australia, each over 5 million km²) is a sea island; every level-3 polygon is an island in a lake or river; Antarctica is kept separately in GSHHG, and its 328 islands are counted too. Pieces cut at the date line were joined. Areas are GSHHG's own, within the coastline, lakes included. The smallest island in the data is 177 m².
Countries and regions. Each island takes the Natural Earth country under it, or the nearest one; for islands over 1,000 km² I measured the share in each country and gave the island to the largest. Regions follow Natural Earth's continents, with Hawaii, Easter Island and New Guinea in Oceania, the French and Dutch Caribbean in the Caribbean, and Asian Russia in Asia. Names come from Natural Earth's physical labels, and I named by hand the larger islands it leaves out, checking each by position and size.
People. WorldPop Global 2 (release 2024B), the constrained 2025 estimate at 30 arc seconds, about 1 km, as re-tiled on GitHub by the world-population-3d project (31,873,615 populated cells, those with 3 or more people). Each cell goes to the land polygon under its centre; coastal cells whose centre falls in the sea go to an island that touches them or to the nearest land within two cells. Only 1.5 million people could not be placed. A 1 km cell cannot split a city across a narrow channel, so small islands next to big cities are rough.
What this cannot say. Counts below 1 km² depend on the map's resolution. GSHHG is built from older shoreline data: it misses reclaimed land, some small lake and river islands, and Nettilling Lake, and it joins some islands to their neighbours or the mainland (Manhattan, Salsette, Samosir, Montreal with Laval) while it splits others (the Brodeur Peninsula is cut off from Baffin Island). WorldPop is a model: it places people by satellite-detected buildings, so it can miss small remote settlements. Natural Earth's borders are de facto, not a view on any dispute.