Which Countries Have the Most Islands?

Sweden has more islands than any other country on Earth — roughly 267,000, if you count every rock that breaks the surface. Norway has around 240,000 and Finland around 180,000 (or 40,000, depending on the minimum size). The three Nordic countries between them hold more islands than the rest of the world combined. Indonesia, the country most people name first, has about 17,500.

Why the Nordics win

Two things. First, geology: the last ice age scraped the Baltic and Scandinavian coasts into a maze of hard-rock knobs and hollows, and when the ice melted the sea flooded the hollows and left the knobs as islands — a landscape called a skerry guard. Second, definition: Sweden and Finland count anything above water larger than a few square metres, so a boulder with a gull on it makes the tally. Countries that only count inhabited or named islands report far smaller numbers.

The ranking

1. Sweden — about 267,000 islands; roughly 1,000 are inhabited.
2. Norway — about 240,000, including the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
3. Finland — about 180,000, with the Archipelago Sea off the south-west coast the densest island cluster in the world.
4. Canada — about 52,000 named islands, including three of the ten largest islands on Earth.
5. United States — tens of thousands, concentrated in Alaska and the Great Lakes.
6. Indonesia — about 17,500, of which around 6,000 are inhabited.
7. Australia — about 8,200 islands.
8. Philippines — about 7,640 islands.
9. Japan — about 14,125, after a 2023 government recount more than doubled the previous figure.

Most islands by land area, not count

If you rank by how much of a country is island rather than mainland, the picture flips to the tropics: Indonesia and the Philippines are almost entirely islands, and small archipelagic states — the Maldives (around 1,190 coral islands), the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Tonga, the Bahamas — are all-island nations. The Maldives is also the flattest country in the world, with a highest natural point under three metres.