When we see a standard map, we focus on the largest countries by area. We show in another article how the world looks in this way. 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. Greenland is the least dense, with around 0.1 people per km², followed by Mongolia, Namibia, Australia, and Iceland. 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. It’s followed by Rwanda (584), South Korea (530), Burundi (529), and the Netherlands (525). This is almost three times as dense as its neighbor, India. Of the larger countries 1, Bangladesh is the most densely populated, with 1,342 people per km². Singapore has 8,430 people per km² that’s more than 200 times as dense as the United States and 2,000 times as Australia. The five most densely populated are Macao, Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Gibraltar. Many of the world’s small islands or isolated states have large populations for their size. Globally, the average population density is 62 people per km² in 2024, but there are very large differences across countries. The map shows the number of people per square kilometer (km 2) across countries.

It is calculated by dividing the total population of an area by its total land area. Population density is a measure of how densely populated an area is. To understand this, we need to look at population density. But this tells us nothing about where in the world people live. Geographical maps often shape our understanding of the world.

Us map with population density