Monaco to Mongolia: the most crowded and emptiest countries

Monaco has about 18,700 people per square kilometre. Mongolia has about two. Both are full UN members. Spread their people evenly over their land and a Monegasque would share a doubles tennis court with four other people. A Mongolian would get about 45 hectares, roughly 60 football pitches, to themselves.

Population density is one of the simplest numbers there is: people divided by land area. It's also one of the easiest to guess wrong, because our sense of "crowded" comes from cities, and density counts the whole country.

Guess first

Which of these is the most densely populated?

NetherlandsIndiaJapanRwanda

The crowded end

The top of the list is mostly city-sized places:

1. Macao, about 20,570 people per km²
2. Monaco, 18,690
3. Singapore, 8,240
4. Hong Kong, 7,180
5. Gibraltar, 3,850

Macao, Hong Kong and Gibraltar are territories rather than countries, but they show what a place looks like when the whole of it is city. Monaco is only about 2 km² in total. Singapore is the one to look at twice: more than 6 million people on an island smaller than many metropolitan areas, and still green enough to be called a garden city.

The densest places are also the ones still making land. Singapore has grown by about a quarter since the 1960s by filling in parts of the sea. Macao is roughly three times the size it was a century ago. Monaco built a whole district, Fontvieille, on reclaimed land, and added another strip in 2024. Every new hectare nudges their density down a little, which is one reason these numbers shift between sources.

After the city-states come small islands. Bahrain, the Maldives and Malta all have between 1,700 and 2,000 people per km².

Then you hit the country that breaks the pattern.

Bangladesh

Bangladesh is ninth, at about 1,320 people per km², and nothing near the top of the list comes close to its size. It's a little larger than Greece. Greece has about 10 million people. Bangladesh has 174 million, roughly 17 times as many.

Now the surprising part: two-thirds of Bangladeshis don't live in cities. Only about a third of the population is urban. The density comes from a huge rural population farming one of the most fertile river deltas on Earth, not from skyscrapers.

Rwanda and the quiz-show trap

Rwanda is the twist in the question above. It has about 566 people per km², more than the Netherlands, India or Japan, and it's the densest country on mainland Africa. Its neighbour Burundi is next, at 533.

Like Bangladesh, Rwanda is mostly rural. Only about 30% of people live in towns. The hills are covered in small farms, and there isn't much empty land between them.

The trap is that we picture density as tower blocks and traffic. Japan feels crowded because Tokyo is enormous, but a lot of Japan is steep, forested mountain where almost nobody lives, and that empty land counts in the average.

The empty end

At the bottom of the list:

1. Greenland, 0.14 people per km²
2. Mongolia, 2.2
3. Australia, 3.5
4. Namibia, 3.6
5. Iceland, 3.8

Greenland is mostly ice sheet, and Mongolia is mostly steppe and desert. Nearly half of Mongolia's 3.3 million people live in one city, Ulaanbaatar, which makes the rest of the country even emptier than the average suggests.

Australia and Canada (4.6) show the limit of the measure. Both average out as nearly empty, yet more than 80% of each country's people live in towns and cities. Most Australians live near the coast, mainly in the south-east. Most Canadians live in a band close to the US border. The average describes a country that very few of its people experience.

For comparison, the United States has about 37 people per km², Russia about 9, and China about 150.

What to take into a duel

Three things help when density comes up:

• Small islands and city-states win almost every time.
• A large, mostly rural country can still be dense. Look at Bangladesh and Rwanda.
• Big countries with a lot of desert, ice or forest lose, even if their cities are huge.

The tricky matchups put a rich, famous, "crowded" country against a poorer one with a lot of farmland. The Netherlands against Rwanda is close. The United Kingdom, at 283, loses to Rwanda by a factor of two.

If you want to see the pattern on a map rather than a list, the population density map makes the clusters obvious.