Australia is surrounded by water on every side and covers 7,617,930 km², and it is not on this list — geographers count it as a continental landmass rather than an island, and that one convention is what makes a ranking like this possible at all. What is left runs from Greenland at 2,108,459 km² down to Ireland at 83,721 km², spread across fourteen countries and territories and every ocean but the Southern. Two rules decide the order. Every figure is the main island alone, taken from a single shoreline survey — the USGS, Esri and UNEP-WCMC pass published in March 2026 — rather than blended from national statistics of different vintages and methods. That is why Sumatra appears here at 428,134 km² and not the 473,481 km² quoted almost everywhere, a figure that counts Nias, the Mentawai Islands, Bangka and Belitung alongside it. And every island is one you could stand on today. Hokkaido misses the cut by about 6,000 km².
20 Largest Islands in the World (2026)
The record The largest island in the world is Greenland — 2,108,459 km² (814,080.8 sq mi), land area. Source: Wikipedia (List of islands by area) citing USGS/Esri/UNEP-WCMC Global Islands v3, March 2026; Wikidata Q223 P2046 gives 2,166,086 km² counting offshore islands. Verified .
Largest Islands in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Largest Islands
- Australia is not on this list, and that is deliberate — at 7,617,930 km² it is nearly four times the size of Greenland, but geographers count it as a continental landmass rather than an island. Change that one convention and every ranking of the world's largest islands is rewritten.
- Greenland is the most misread shape on any world map — on the Mercator projection behind most classroom maps and web mapping services it appears roughly the size of Africa. Africa is about fourteen times larger.
- Borneo is the only island on Earth shared by three countries — Indonesia holds around three-quarters of it, Malaysia the northern states of Sabah and Sarawak, and Brunei a small stretch of coast between them.
- Java is the most populous island in the world — more than 150 million people live on a landmass roughly the size of England, ranked only thirteenth here by area.
- Canada holds three of the top ten — Baffin, Victoria and Ellesmere, with Newfoundland making four in the top twenty. Almost all of that land is Arctic and nearly uninhabited.
- The closest margin on the list is 557 km² — Victoria Island edges out Great Britain by less than a quarter of one percent, though one holds about 2,000 people and the other more than sixty million.
1. Greenland
At 2,108,459 km², Greenland is not merely the largest island on Earth but one of the great mismatches in geography: it is roughly three times the size of the runner-up and larger than the next three entries on this list combined. About four-fifths of it lies under an ice sheet up to three kilometres thick, which is why a landmass bigger than Western Europe supports a population of around 56,000 — the lowest density of any territory in the world.
That ice is also why Greenland is the island most people picture wrongly. On the Mercator projection that hangs in classrooms and sits behind most web maps, it stretches to roughly the size of Africa; in reality Africa is about fourteen times larger. Travel here works by boat, plane and snowmobile rather than by road, because no highway connects one town to the next. Nuuk, the capital, sits on the southwest coast where the ice retreats far enough inland to leave room for a city.
2. New Guinea
At 773,751 km², New Guinea is the largest tropical island in the world and the second largest of any kind, a single landmass split down the middle by a straight line of longitude — Indonesia to the west, Papua New Guinea to the east. A spine of mountains runs its full length, and it climbs higher than any island mountain anywhere: Puncak Jaya reaches 4,884 metres, high enough to hold glaciers within a few degrees of the equator.
That terrain is the reason New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse place on the planet. Valleys separated by a day's walk over a ridge developed separately for thousands of years, and Papua New Guinea alone accounts for over 800 living languages — more than any other country. The lowland rainforest and the highland valleys between them hold species still being catalogued, including tree kangaroos and most of the world's birds-of-paradise.
3. Borneo
At 723,154 km², Borneo is the third largest island on Earth and the only one shared by three countries: Indonesia holds roughly three-quarters of it as Kalimantan, Malaysia takes the northern states of Sabah and Sarawak, and the small sultanate of Brunei occupies a sliver of coast between them. The border is a legacy of treaties drawn between European empires in the nineteenth century rather than anything the landscape suggests.
Its rainforest is among the oldest on the planet, and it is the wild home of the Bornean orangutan alongside pygmy elephants and proboscis monkeys. Mount Kinabalu rises to 4,095 metres in Sabah and is climbable over two days by anyone reasonably fit, making it one of the most accessible high summits in Southeast Asia. The Kinabatangan River in the east is the reliable place to see wildlife from a boat at dawn.
4. Madagascar
At 592,521 km², Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world and the most biologically distinctive place on it. It broke away from the African mainland and then from India tens of millions of years ago, and everything that arrived afterwards evolved in isolation: more than 90% of its wildlife exists nowhere else, including all of its lemurs and nearly all of its native amphibians.
The landscape is as varied as the wildlife. A central highland plateau of terraced rice paddies drops east to rainforest and west to dry deciduous woodland and the limestone pinnacles of Tsingy de Bemaraha, a national park of stone blades sharp enough to require ropes and harnesses to cross. The Avenue of the Baobabs near Morondava is the image most visitors arrive with, a row of trees several centuries old standing over a dirt road.
5. Baffin Island
At 507,205 km², Baffin Island is the largest island in Canada and the fifth largest anywhere — bigger than Spain, with a population of around 13,000 spread between a handful of communities. It sits in Nunavut, separated from Greenland by the Davis Strait, and it is the first place on this list where the numbers stop meaning what they usually mean: this is an area the size of a large European country holding roughly the population of a small town.
Its eastern coast is a wall of granite. Auyuittuq National Park protects a stretch of it where Mount Thor presents the greatest purely vertical drop on Earth, a face of about 1,200 metres that leans out past vertical over its full height. The park's Akshayuk Pass is a through-hike between fjords, crossed on foot in summer and by snowmobile in spring. Iqaluit, the territorial capital, is the practical gateway.
6. Sumatra
At 428,134 km², Sumatra is the sixth largest island in the world — and the entry where this list most visibly parts company with the numbers you will find elsewhere. The widely quoted 473,481 km² is Sumatra plus its attendant archipelagos: Nias, the Mentawai Islands, Enggano, the Riau Islands, Bangka and Belitung. Measured as one island, it is smaller than that, and still larger than Sweden.
It is the only place on Earth where tigers, orangutans, rhinoceroses and elephants share the same forest, though all four are now endangered and Gunung Leuser in the north is the likeliest place to see any of them. The island is strung along the Bukit Barisan mountains, an active volcanic chain, and holds Lake Toba — the largest volcanic lake in the world, filling a caldera left by an eruption around 74,000 years ago that ranks among the largest in the geological record.
7. Honshu
At 228,296 km², Honshu is the seventh largest island in the world, the largest in Japan, and by some distance the most densely populated entry on this list. Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima and Nagoya are all here, and so is roughly four-fifths of Japan's population, concentrated on coastal plains that make up a small fraction of the island's surface.
The rest is mountains. The Japanese Alps run through the centre, and Mount Fuji rises to 3,776 metres near the Pacific coast — climbable in summer, visible from Tokyo on a clear winter morning. The contrast is what makes Honshu rewarding to travel: the shinkansen crosses it end to end in a matter of hours, and the gap between a Tokyo intersection and a cedar-lined trail on the Kumano Kodō is a short train ride rather than an expedition.
8. Victoria Island
At 219,191 km², Victoria Island is the eighth largest island in the world, the second largest in Canada, and the only one anywhere divided between two Canadian territories — the boundary between the Northwest Territories and Nunavut runs straight down through it. Around 2,000 people live here, almost all of them in Cambridge Bay on the southeast coast and Ulukhaktok in the west.
The terrain is low, rolling Arctic tundra rather than the granite drama of Baffin, and it is threaded with lakes and shallow bays that freeze for much of the year. Muskoxen are common, and the island carries archaeological traces of the Thule and Copper Inuit who preceded today's communities. Cambridge Bay sits on the Northwest Passage and has become a regular stop for the small number of ships that now make the transit each summer.
9. Great Britain
At 218,635 km², Great Britain is the ninth largest island in the world and the largest in Europe — and it lands within 557 km² of Victoria Island above it, the closest margin anywhere on this list. Two islands could hardly be less alike: one holds about 2,000 people, the other more than sixty million, along with England, Scotland and Wales.
For its size it packs in an unusual amount of variety. The Scottish Highlands rise to Ben Nevis at 1,345 metres, the Lake District and Snowdonia hold mountains within a few hours of major cities, and no point on the island is much more than 110 kilometres from tidal water. That compactness is what makes it satisfying to travel slowly: the coast path, the long-distance trails and the rail network all cover ground that changes character every hour or two.
10. Ellesmere Island
At 197,790 km², Ellesmere Island is the tenth largest island in the world and the northernmost substantial landmass on Earth, its top end reaching within about 800 kilometres of the North Pole. It is also the emptiest entry here by a wide margin: fewer than 200 people live on an island larger than Belarus, in Grise Fiord, the research base at Eureka, and the weather station at Alert.
Alert is the northernmost continuously inhabited place in the world, and the island around it is a polar desert — so little snow falls that parts of it stay bare rock and gravel through winter. Quttinirpaaq National Park covers the northern fifth, protecting ice caps, Barbeau Peak at 2,616 metres, and fossil forests from a period when this latitude was temperate. Reaching any of it means a chartered flight and considerable planning.
11. Sulawesi
At 169,981 km², Sulawesi is the eleventh largest island in the world and unmistakable on any map — four long peninsulas radiating from a mountainous centre, a shape produced by two continental plates colliding and fusing. The arms are separated by deep gulfs, so travelling between them by road takes far longer than the straight-line distance suggests.
That tectonic history left it biologically stranded between Asia and Australia, in the transitional zone naturalists call Wallacea, and it holds animals found nowhere else: babirusa, anoa, and the black crested macaque. Tana Toraja in the highlands is known for elaborate funeral traditions and boat-shaped tongkonan houses, while Bunaken Marine Park off the northern tip drops into a wall of coral that makes it one of Indonesia's best-regarded dive sites.
12. South Island
At 150,683 km², New Zealand's South Island — Te Waipounamu — is the twelfth largest island in the world and the larger of the country's two main islands, though it holds only about a quarter of the population. The Southern Alps run almost its full length, throwing up Aoraki / Mount Cook at 3,724 metres and casting a rain shadow that turns the eastern side to dry tussock grassland while the west stays temperate rainforest.
The scale of the emptiness is the appeal. Fiordland in the southwest is a national park of glacier-cut inlets where Milford Sound draws the crowds and Doubtful Sound rewards the effort of getting further in. Glaciers descend close to sea level on the West Coast, the Otago interior holds gold-rush towns and vineyards, and the distances between them are short enough to drive but empty enough to feel long.
13. Java
At 127,467 km², Java is the thirteenth largest island in the world and, by a very large margin, the most populous — more than 150 million people live here, over half of Indonesia's population on an island roughly the size of England. No other island on Earth carries anything like that number.
Volcanic soil is the reason. A chain of active volcanoes runs the length of the island, and the ash they shed has made Java's farmland extraordinarily productive for centuries. Mount Bromo and Ijen, with its blue sulphur flames and turquoise crater lake, are the two most visited. The island also holds the ninth-century Buddhist monument of Borobudur and the Hindu temple complex at Prambanan, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and Jakarta, the national capital, on its northwest coast.
14. North Island
At 114,573 km², New Zealand's North Island — Te Ika-a-Māui — is the fourteenth largest island in the world, smaller than its southern neighbour but home to about three-quarters of the country's people, including Auckland and the capital, Wellington. It is the warmer and more geologically restless of the pair.
The Taupō Volcanic Zone runs through its centre, and Lake Taupō itself fills a caldera left by an eruption around 1,800 years ago that was among the most violent anywhere in the last few thousand years. Rotorua sits on the same system, with geysers, mud pools and a sulphur smell that never quite lifts, and it is the strongest centre of Māori cultural tourism in the country. Tongariro National Park to the south offers the Alpine Crossing, widely rated the best day walk in New Zealand.
15. Newfoundland
At 108,878 km², Newfoundland is the fifteenth largest island in the world and the first of three entries — with Cuba and Luzon — that sit close enough together for the choice of measurement to decide their order. On the national survey figures most lists use, Luzon leads this group; on the single 2026 shoreline pass this list ranks on, Newfoundland does.
It is a place of hard rock and harder weather off Canada's Atlantic coast. Gros Morne National Park protects the Tablelands, a stretch of exposed Earth's mantle so barren it helped confirm plate tectonics, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for exactly that reason. L'Anse aux Meadows at the northern tip is the only confirmed Norse settlement in North America, dating to around a thousand years ago. St. John's on the east coast is among the oldest European-founded cities in North America.
16. Cuba
At 105,468 km², Cuba is the sixteenth largest island in the world and much the largest in the Caribbean — larger than all the other Greater Antilles put together, and long enough that driving its length takes a serious day. The figure here is the main island alone; counting Isla de la Juventud and the thousands of keys strung along both coasts pushes the country's total closer to 110,000 km².
Most of it is gentle: rolling farmland and sugar country, with the Sierra Maestra rising in the southeast to Pico Turquino at 1,974 metres. The limestone mogotes of the Viñales valley in the west are the landscape most photographed, round-shouldered hills standing over tobacco fields still worked with oxen. Havana holds one of the largest and best-preserved colonial old towns in the Americas.
17. Luzon
At 104,835 km², Luzon is the seventeenth largest island in the world and the largest and most populous in the Philippines. It is also the entry where this list's choice of measurement matters most: the traditional national figure of 109,965 km² would lift Luzon above both Cuba and Newfoundland, and the single-survey figure used here places it below them. The gap across all three is under 5%.
Manila and the surrounding metropolitan area sit on the central plain, but the island's reputation rests on what lies beyond it. The rice terraces around Banaue and Batad in the Cordillera highlands were carved into the mountainsides over centuries and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Mayon Volcano in the southeast is close to a perfect cone, and the beaches and limestone islands around the Bicol and Zambales coasts are within a day's travel of the capital.
18. Iceland
At 100,261 km², Iceland is the eighteenth largest island in the world and the only place where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rises above the sea as a substantial landmass. The North American and Eurasian plates are pulling apart directly beneath it, which is why an island this far north is also one of the most volcanically active places on the planet.
The consequences are everywhere. Almost all of the country's heating and electricity comes from geothermal and hydroelectric sources; Vatnajökull in the southeast is the largest ice cap in Europe by volume, and the glacial rivers running off it have cut waterfalls across the south coast. At Þingvellir you can walk in the rift valley between the two plates, on the site where Iceland's parliament first met over a thousand years ago. Reykjavík is the northernmost capital of any sovereign state.
19. Mindanao
At 94,469 km², Mindanao is the nineteenth largest island in the world and the second largest in the Philippines, occupying the southern end of the archipelago. It is more mountainous and less developed for tourism than Luzon, and it carries the country's highest point in Mount Apo, a dormant volcano reaching 2,954 metres above Davao.
The island's landscapes reward the extra effort of reaching them. The Enchanted River in Surigao del Sur is a short, startlingly clear spring-fed channel running to the sea, and Tinuy-an Falls nearby spreads across a broad limestone shelf. Camiguin, just offshore, packs volcanoes, hot springs and a sunken cemetery into an island you can circle in an afternoon. Davao is the main gateway and the centre of the durian trade the region is known for.
20. Ireland
At 83,721 km², Ireland closes this list as the twentieth largest island in the world and the third largest in Europe, shared between two jurisdictions — the Republic of Ireland covering roughly five-sixths of it and Northern Ireland the remainder. It is the last island to clear the cut; Hokkaido, next in line, falls about 6,000 km² short.
Its shape is unusual: a low central plain of bog and pasture almost entirely ringed by coastal mountains, so the interior stays flat while the edges rise. That rim is where the landscape earns its reputation — the Cliffs of Moher on the west coast, the Ring of Kerry around the Macgillycuddy's Reeks and Carrauntoohil at 1,038 metres, and the basalt columns of the Giant's Causeway on the north Antrim coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
FAQ: The World's Largest Islands
What is the largest island in the world?
Greenland, at 2,108,459 km². It is roughly three times the size of New Guinea behind it and larger than the next three islands on this list combined. About four-fifths of it lies under an ice sheet, which is why a landmass bigger than Western Europe supports a population of only around 56,000.
Why isn't Australia counted as one of the largest islands?
Australia is surrounded by water on every side and covers 7,617,930 km², but geographers class it as a continental landmass rather than an island — one of four, alongside Afro-Eurasia, the Americas and Antarctica. That convention is what makes an island ranking possible at all: count Australia and the list becomes a list of continents.
Why do different sources give different sizes for the same island?
Because they are measuring different things. Some figures cover the main island alone; others add its attached archipelagos, or an island state's outlying territory. Sumatra is quoted at both 428,134 and 473,481 km² for exactly that reason. This list uses one shoreline survey throughout, so every entry is measured the same way.
Which is the largest island in Europe?
Great Britain, at 218,635 km², which places it ninth in the world. Europe puts two more islands in the global top twenty — Iceland at 100,261 km² and Ireland at 83,721 km² — but nothing else on the continent comes close to the Arctic and tropical giants ranked above them.
Is Greenland really as big as Africa?
No — Africa is about fourteen times larger. Greenland only looks comparable on the Mercator projection used by most classroom maps and web mapping services, which stretches land increasingly as it moves away from the equator. It is the most commonly misjudged shape on any world map.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.