What actually counts as an island
Before any ranking means anything, the definition has to be settled. An island is generally defined as a piece of land permanently above water, entirely surrounded by water, that is smaller than a continent. That sounds simple, but national mapping agencies disagree sharply on the minimum size a feature must clear to be logged as an island rather than a skerry, an islet or a rock that occasionally floods. Norway's mapping authority, Kartverket, counts anything larger than about 10 square meters. China's official inventory, kept under its Islands Protection Law, enumerates features above 500 square meters, fifty times larger. Some countries exclude features that are fully submerged at high tide; others include them. None of these counting rules are wrong exactly, but they are not the same rule, which means the totals below cannot be compared as if they were.
Sweden's count, and why it wins on the usual definition
Statistics Sweden, the national statistics agency, puts the country's island count at about 267,570 in its 2013 inventory, the great majority of them tiny, uninhabited skerries scattered through the Stockholm and Gothenburg archipelagos and the country's tens of thousands of lakes. Fewer than 1,000 of them are inhabited, and as of a 2013 count only around 8,000 had any buildings on them at all. The method explains the scale of it: Statistics Sweden read every patch of land fully enclosed by water off the national property map at 1:10,000, so the smallest entries in the register are 9 square meters. It is a count built from very small features, which is exactly why it produces such a large number, and exactly why comparing it to a country using a stricter threshold understates that other country's true island count rather than proving it has fewer islands.
Top five by national count
| Rank | Country | Islands | Source and method |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sweden | ~267,570 | Statistics Sweden, 2013 inventory, smallest islands 9 sq m |
| 2 | Norway | ~239,057 | Kartverket (Norwegian Mapping Authority), 2011 review, features over 10 sq m |
| 3 | Finland | ~179,584 | thisisFINLAND, the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs country service |
| 4 | Canada | ~52,455 | Figure compiled from Atlas of Canada coastline data, Natural Resources Canada |
| 5 | Indonesia | ~17,380 | Badan Informasi Geospasial, 2024 verified island registry |
Beyond the top five, published national figures thin out and become harder to verify against a single consistent source, which is why this list stops at the countries with a clear, citable national count rather than padding out a top ten with estimates.
Why the counts differ so much
Three things drive the disagreement: the minimum size threshold, whether tidal or seasonally submerged features count, and how thoroughly a country has actually surveyed its coastline and inland waters. Countries with huge numbers of lake islands and fragmented, glaciated coastlines, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Canada, tend to top these lists because their terrain simply produces enormous numbers of small features regardless of threshold. Indonesia, despite having far fewer islands by count, has more total island land area and a far larger population living on islands, which is a different and arguably more meaningful measure than a raw count of skerries.
The ranking is a ranking of definitions
None of this makes the numbers useless, but it does mean a reader should treat them as five separate national surveys rather than one league table. Sweden and Norway are counting at roughly the same resolution, which is why their totals sit within about 10% of each other and why the order between them is genuinely meaningful. Finland's published figure of about 179,584 comes from a different survey again, and a 2025 Finnish count using a 100 square meter floor puts the number nearer 187,000, which is a good illustration of how much a single threshold moves the answer. Indonesia is the clearest case of the opposite problem: its registry counts islands that had to be named, surveyed and verified for territorial purposes, which is a far higher bar than appearing as an enclosed patch of land on a map, so a figure around 17,380 is not comparable to Sweden's 267,570 in any useful sense. If you want the question that has one answer, ask which country has the largest total island land area, or the most people living on islands. Indonesia wins both.
Quick facts
- Sweden reports about 267,570 islands, the highest national count, per Statistics Sweden.
- Norway (about 239,057, Kartverket's 2011 review) and Finland (about 179,584) rank next, both using very low size thresholds.
- Counting rules vary by country: Norway counts features over 10 square meters, China requires 500 square meters.
- Because thresholds differ, island counts across countries are not directly comparable.