Sweden is generally considered the country with the most islands in the world, with estimates at around 267,000 individual islands, the vast majority of which are uninhabited.

Quick Scoop

The short answer

  • Sweden holds the record for the most islands of any country, with roughly 267,000 islands spread along its coasts and inland waters.
  • Only a tiny fraction of these islands are inhabited, which is why this fact often surprises people who associate “island countries” more with Indonesia or the Philippines.

Why Sweden tops the list

  • Sweden’s coastline and lake systems are extremely fragmented, producing huge numbers of small rocky islets and skerries that all count as separate islands under local definitions.
  • Famous clusters include the Stockholm Archipelago, often said to have over 30,000 islands and islets on its own, plus major islands like Gotland and Öland that are popular for holidays.

Other high-island countries

  • After Sweden, countries with very high island counts include Norway (over 300,000 in some tallies) and Finland (around 179,000), followed by Japan, Canada, and Chile with tens of thousands each.
  • Big tropical archipelagos like Indonesia and the Philippines actually have far fewer islands numerically (in the tens of thousands or less) but more of them are inhabited and well known to travelers.

A small technical twist

  • There is no single global standard for what “counts” as an island, so numbers differ slightly between sources and years and can change as mapping improves.
  • That said, across recent geographic datasets and popular references, Sweden still clearly comes out on top by a wide margin.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.