How many countries are there in the world? 193, 195, or 197?

It sounds like a simple question — the kind you'd find on a pub quiz or a third-grade geography test. But there is no global authority that publishes the list. There is no treaty that says “these exact entities are countries and these are not.” There are only conventions, and those conventions quietly disagree with each other. Ask the United Nations, get one answer. Ask the International Organization for Standardization, get another. Ask a travel blogger, get a third. All three are correct — they're just answering different questions.

This guide walks through the four counts you'll actually run into, explains the history and politics behind each one, and shows you which count makes sense for which situation. It also spends a lot of time on the edge cases — Taiwan, Kosovo, Palestine, Vatican City, Somaliland, and the handful of other places that break any neat definition — because those edge cases are where most of the real disagreement lives.

The short answer: 195

The count most travelers use is 195. That's the 193 full member states of the United Nations, plus two “permanent observer” states — the Holy See (Vatican City) and the State of Palestine — that every major travel publication treats as countries.^[1]

It's the count on the back of airline magazines, on National Geographic maps, on Lonely Planet guidebook covers, on scratch-off travel posters, and on My Travel Maps. If you're keeping a travel journal, collecting passport stamps, or trying to join the unofficial “100 country club,” use 195. It's the answer that will make sense in the most conversations.

But 195 isn't the only defensible answer, and to understand why, you have to understand why there is no single official count in the first place.

Why “country” has no single definition

The closest thing to a legal definition of statehood is the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, signed in 1933 by several Latin American nations and the United States.^[2] Article 1 lists four criteria for a state:

1. A permanent population
2. A defined territory
3. A government
4. The capacity to enter into relations with other states

By this definition, a state exists when it meets these criteria — whether or not other states agree. This is the so-called “declarative theory” of statehood. Under it, Taiwan, Kosovo, Palestine, and even Somaliland all qualify. They have populations, territory, governments, and (in most cases) the ability to sign treaties and conduct foreign affairs.

Competing with the declarative theory is the “constitutive” theory, which holds that a state exists only when other states recognize it. Under this view, Kosovo and Palestine are partial states — real to the countries that recognize them, not-quite-real to the countries that don't. Most modern international law takes a hybrid position: recognition matters, but so does effective control over a defined territory, and the weight of international practice nudges the line from decade to decade.

The practical upshot is that any list of “countries” is a political artifact, not a mathematical fact. Different institutions draw the line in different places for different purposes. The UN draws it one way; the International Organization for Standardization draws it another; the CIA draws a third; the Encyclopaedia Britannica draws a fourth; and travel bloggers collectively draw a fifth. All of them are — in their own way — correct.

Count #1: 193 — UN member states

The strictest, most politically conservative count is “UN member states.” The United Nations General Assembly currently has 193 members, and that is the number you'll see in academic writing, most government documents, and the vast majority of encyclopedias.^[3]

A bit of history puts the 193 figure in context. The UN was founded on October 24, 1945 with 51 original member states — the countries that attended the San Francisco Conference and signed the UN Charter.^[4] Over the next eighty years, the organization grew in waves that tracked major geopolitical shifts:

• 1955 — 16 new members. A Cold War-era logjam over new admissions was broken with a package deal admitting sixteen countries at once, including Ireland, Italy, Austria, Portugal, and several Eastern Bloc states.
• 1960 — 17 new members. The “Year of Africa.” Most of France's former African colonies gained independence and joined the UN in a single year, fundamentally changing the Assembly's balance.
• 1973 — East and West Germany. After decades of separate existence, both German states were admitted simultaneously as part of Cold War détente.
• 1991–1993 — post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav wave. The Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen successor states; Yugoslavia dissolved into five (eventually six); Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Two dozen new members joined in three years.
• 2002 — Switzerland and Timor-Leste. Switzerland had famously held out on UN membership for 57 years, concerned about its neutrality policy. A national referendum finally approved joining. Timor-Leste joined the same year, after winning independence from Indonesia.
• 2006 — Montenegro. Montenegro split from Serbia after a narrow independence referendum and joined the UN weeks later.
• 2011 — South Sudan. The newest UN member. South Sudan gained independence from Sudan on July 9, 2011 and joined the UN five days later, on July 14, 2011.^[3]

South Sudan is still the newest member. It's been nearly fifteen years without a new admission — the longest such gap since the Cold War.

To become a UN member, a country has to be recommended by the Security Council and approved by two-thirds of the General Assembly.^[4] The Security Council has five permanent members — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China — each of which holds a veto. This is why Taiwan, Kosovo, and Palestine are not members: at least one permanent Security Council member would veto any of their admissions, so their applications never come to a vote.

The 193 count is clean and unambiguous — every country on the list is uncontestedly a country. But it's a minimum. It excludes places almost everyone agrees are countries (like Vatican City), and it depends on the diplomatic preferences of five specific governments to decide which entities qualify. For most travelers, 193 is too restrictive.

Count #2: 195 — the travel count

This is the count travelers use, and the one My Travel Maps is built around. It takes the base 193 and adds the two UN permanent observer states that the UN explicitly classifies as “non-member states” (rather than entities or organizations):

• The Holy See (Vatican City) — permanent observer since 1964.^[5] Vatican City is its own sovereign state under international law, with its own government, legal system, diplomatic corps, flag, postal system, and currency (it mints euros under an agreement with the EU). It's the smallest country in the world by both area (about 44 hectares, or 109 acres) and population (fewer than 800 residents). It's entirely surrounded by Rome, and you can walk into it without any border formalities — the only hard checkpoint is at the Vatican Museums.
• The State of Palestine became a UN non-member observer state on November 29, 2012, when the General Assembly passed Resolution 67/19 — the “Status of Palestine in the United Nations” — with 138 states voting in favor, 9 against, and 41 abstentions.^[6] Before that, Palestine had been an “observer entity” since 1974, a lower status that did not imply statehood. The 2012 upgrade was largely symbolic — Palestine still cannot vote in the General Assembly — but it put Palestine in the same formal category as the Holy See for UN purposes. Over 140 UN member states recognize Palestine as a sovereign country today.

Why these two and no other UN observers? The UN system has plenty of other observers, including the European Union, the African Union, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. But only the Holy See and Palestine are specifically classified as “non-member states.” Everyone else is classified as an “entity” or an “organization.” The 195 count uses that UN-internal classification as its line-drawing rule, which is why it's the cleanest compromise between strict UN membership and more inclusive counts.

195 is what Lonely Planet uses. It's what National Geographic uses. It's what most travel-tracking tools use, and the US State Department broadly operates with a list of roughly this size when issuing travel advisories. If you ask any experienced traveler “how many countries are there?”, 195 is the most likely answer you'll get — and it's the answer this site uses.

Count #3: 197 — plus Cook Islands and Niue

You'll occasionally see a higher count in diplomatic and travel sources. This one adds two Pacific island nations in “free association” with New Zealand:

• Cook Islands — in free association with New Zealand since 1965. Has its own parliament, prime minister, foreign ministry, and diplomatic relations with more than 50 countries. Cook Islanders are simultaneously Cook Islands nationals and New Zealand citizens. Not a UN member, not an observer.
• Niue — a similar arrangement with New Zealand since 1974. About 1,600 residents, making it one of the least-populated self-governing territories in the world. Its government is recognized by New Zealand as capable of conducting its own foreign affairs.

Both have what the UN calls “full treaty-making capacity” — they can sign international agreements in their own name.^[7] The UN Secretariat treats them as sovereign states for treaty-registration purposes. But neither is a member, and neither is an observer.

Some travel sources add them and report 197 countries. Most don't — including us. The reason is consistency: if you include Cook Islands and Niue, a consistent rule forces you to also consider Greenland (which has its own government, language, flag, and a gradually growing independence movement), the Faroe Islands (similar status within the Kingdom of Denmark), Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Gibraltar, and a few dozen other territories with varying degrees of self-rule. Drawing the line at 195 — “UN members plus the two UN observer states” — produces a defensible rule that doesn't require relitigating each individual case.

Count #4: 249 — ISO 3166-1 country codes

If you've ever looked at a web domain (.uk, .de, .jp), filled out a country dropdown on a form, or received an international package, you've encountered the ISO 3166-1 standard.^[8] The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) maintains a list of two-letter country codes that software, airlines, banking systems, and international logistics rely on. As of the most recent update, there are 249 officially assigned codes.

The ISO list is a very different beast from the UN list. It includes full UN members, non-member states, and a large collection of territories and dependencies:

• Hong Kong (HK) and Macau (MO) — Special Administrative Regions of China
• Taiwan (TW) — under a diplomatically neutral label
• Greenland (GL) — autonomous territory of Denmark
• The Falkland Islands (FK) — British Overseas Territory
• Guernsey (GG), Jersey (JE), and the Isle of Man (IM) — Crown Dependencies
• Puerto Rico (PR), Guam (GU), and American Samoa (AS) — US territories
• Åland Islands (AX) — autonomous region of Finland
• The British Indian Ocean Territory (IO) — no permanent population

The ISO list is not trying to be a list of countries in the travel sense. It's a list of places that need distinct identifiers for standards purposes. Hong Kong is not a country — it's a Special Administrative Region of China — but if you want to ship a package there, you need a distinct code, so ISO assigns one. ISO 3166-1 is authoritative in its own domain, and it's the wrong list for a travel journal.

Who uses which count?

A rough guide to which count each kind of source prefers, and why:

For almost everyone reading this, the answer is 195. It's the count that will make the most sense in the most conversations, and the count we use across the My Travel Maps site.

Edge cases: countries that don't fit

Now the part where every neat definition starts to wobble. Here are the contested cases we get asked about most often, with enough context to understand why each one is tricky. Our methodology page walks through our map's full case-by-case decisions; this section explains the politics behind those decisions.

Taiwan

Taiwan — officially the Republic of China — is governed entirely separately from the People's Republic of China and runs its own democracy, military, currency, passport, and foreign policy. But it is not a UN member. On October 25, 1971, the General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, which “restored the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China in the United Nations” — transferring the “China” seat from Taipei to Beijing.^[9] Since then, Taiwan has been effectively locked out of UN membership. Almost every country in the world does business with Taiwan through de facto representative offices; fewer than 15 states formally recognize Taiwan as the sole legitimate China, and China's diplomatic pressure has steadily reduced that list.

Most travel tools — including My Travel Maps — show Taiwan as a separate country, because that is how travelers experience it: you fly into Taoyuan with a Taiwanese entry stamp, the customs form says “Republic of China,” and nothing about the experience resembles being in mainland China. Under the 195 count, however, Taiwan does not have its own slot — it is absorbed into the “China” line, which represents the UN-seated Beijing government.

Kosovo

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008. More than 100 UN member states recognize Kosovo, but Serbia, Russia, and China do not — and any one of them holds the power to block UN membership. In 2010 the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion finding that Kosovo's declaration of independence “did not violate general international law,” though the court pointedly did not rule on whether Kosovo was a state in the full legal sense.^[10] Most travelers count Kosovo as a country, and most travel maps — including ours — display it as one.

Palestine

Already covered under Count #2. Palestine is a UN non-member observer state with recognition from more than 140 member states. Its internationally-recognized territory is the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, though the practical situation on the ground is complicated by Israeli administration of parts of those territories and by the ongoing conflict. My Travel Maps displays Palestine as a separate country on the world map.

Western Sahara

Western Sahara is a sparsely-populated region south of Morocco that has been disputed since Spain withdrew from the territory in 1975. Morocco claims it as its “Southern Provinces.” The Polisario Front, a Sahrawi independence movement, declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in 1976 and claims the territory as an independent state. SADR is recognized by more than 40 UN member states and is a full member of the African Union. Natural Earth (the open-source boundary dataset most travel maps rely on) treats Western Sahara as a separate territory, which is also how we display it on My Travel Maps.

Somaliland

Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in 1991. It has its own government, army, currency (the Somaliland shilling), passport, parliament, and elections — by most practical measures it functions as a state. But not a single UN member formally recognizes it. Somaliland is the most developed example of a de facto state with essentially zero de jure recognition, and it's the case that most clearly shows the gap between the Montevideo-style declarative theory of statehood and the recognition-based constitutive theory.

Northern Cyprus

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) declared independence in 1983 after Turkey's 1974 military intervention on the island. Only Turkey recognizes it. The rest of the world — including every other UN member — treats the whole island of Cyprus as part of the Republic of Cyprus (a UN member and an EU member state). Travelers going to the Turkish-administered north can only fly in via Turkey.

Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia

Three separatist regions in the post-Soviet space, all with de facto independence supported by Russia but recognized by almost no one else. Transnistria is a narrow strip on the Moldovan side of the Dniester River; Abkhazia and South Ossetia occupy northwestern Georgia. After Russia's 2008 war with Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were recognized as independent by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru, and Syria. Transnistria is not recognized even by Russia.

Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh)

Until September 2023, Nagorno-Karabakh — also known as the Republic of Artsakh — was a de facto independent, ethnically Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. A month-long Azerbaijani military operation in late 2023 led to its dissolution and the mass exodus of its Armenian population to Armenia. The Republic of Artsakh officially ceased to exist on January 1, 2024. Older travel maps will still show it; newer ones won't.

Sovereign Military Order of Malta

A genuine historical curiosity. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is a Catholic lay religious order, headquartered in Rome, that is recognized as a sovereign subject of international law, issues its own passports, prints its own stamps, and has diplomatic relations with more than 100 countries — but it has no territory. It's a sovereign state with no land. No one counts it as a country when tallying travel destinations, but it exists in a category of its own.

The UK is one country and four countries

The United Kingdom is a single UN member state, a single country in every international-law sense, and a single entry on every travel map we've ever seen. But inside the UK, the vocabulary gets unusual. The UK consists of four “constituent countries”:

• England
• Scotland
• Wales
• Northern Ireland

Each has its own football team in international competitions — the “Home Nations.” Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each have their own devolved parliament or assembly, and Scotland narrowly voted against independence in a 2014 referendum (55% no, 45% yes). England, confusingly, has no devolved parliament of its own — its affairs are managed by the UK Parliament at Westminster.

From outside the UK, the UK is one country. From inside, it's four countries inside a single sovereign state — a vocabulary unique to the UK that has no direct parallel anywhere else in the world. Every traveler we've ever met counts “the UK” as one entry on their travel map, not four.

There are also the Crown Dependencies — Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man — which are self-governing possessions of the British Crown but are not part of the United Kingdom itself. And the British Overseas Territories — Bermuda, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands, and ten others — which are under UK sovereignty but have internal self-government. None of these appear on the 195 list, but most have their own ISO 3166-1 codes and show up on the 249 count.

Antarctica and the poles

Antarctica is not a country. It's a continent governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, a 1959 agreement that suspends national sovereignty claims and designates the entire continent as a scientific preserve for peaceful use.^[11] Seven countries — Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom — maintain overlapping claims to parts of Antarctica, but these claims are not recognized by most other states, and no government exercises effective sovereignty over any piece of Antarctic land.

About 40,000 tourists visit Antarctica every year, most of them on cruise ships that depart from Ushuaia, Argentina. A visit to Antarctica is a continent visit, not a country visit — it doesn't change your country count. If you're marking continents, though, it definitely counts for that.

The Arctic is different. Unlike Antarctica, the Arctic is an ocean, not a land mass. The land around the Arctic Ocean belongs to existing countries — Canada, the United States (Alaska), Russia, Norway, Denmark (via Greenland), Iceland, Sweden, and Finland. There is no “Arctic country.” If you've been to Svalbard, Ilulissat, or Utqiagvik, you've visited Norway, Denmark, or the US.

Could the number change?

Yes, though rarely.

The most recent new country was South Sudan in 2011. Before that, Montenegro in 2006. Before that, Timor-Leste in 2002. The rate of new country creation has slowed dramatically since the post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav wave of the early 1990s, and there's no clear pipeline of imminent admissions.

That said, there are a handful of active independence movements with plausible — though not imminent — paths to becoming UN members:

• Scotland. The 2014 referendum produced a 55% No vote. A second referendum has been on the table ever since, but requires UK government consent. The Scottish National Party's political fortunes have fluctuated, and Brexit scrambled the political calculus on both sides.
• Catalonia. The Spanish Constitutional Court has consistently held that Catalan independence would be unconstitutional, and the 2017 unilateral referendum was declared illegal. Independence supporters remain a large minority in Catalonia but cannot reach a clear majority.
• Somaliland. Has stronger institutions than almost any other unrecognized state, but is blocked by Somalia's unwillingness to accept partition and the African Union's general reluctance to bless border changes.
• New Caledonia. Voted against independence from France in three referendums (2018, 2020, 2021), though the margin narrowed each time. The political process is now on pause.
• Taiwan. The status quo has held for decades. Any formal declaration of independence would likely trigger a severe Chinese response, so the practical situation is unlikely to change through a Taiwanese initiative.

Countries can also disappear, though that's even rarer. The last major example was German reunification in 1990, which reduced the count by one (East and West Germany became a single Germany). Zanzibar and Tanganyika merged into Tanzania in 1964. Yemen merged in 1990 (the Yemen Arab Republic and People's Democratic Republic of Yemen became a single Yemen).

On net: the number of countries in the world is remarkably stable. It has only ticked up by a handful over the past decade, and the long-term trend is slowing.

Frequently asked questions

Is South Sudan still the newest country?

Yes. South Sudan gained independence from Sudan on July 9, 2011 and joined the UN five days later, on July 14, 2011. It is the newest full member of the United Nations.

Why do some sources say 196, 197, 204, or 206?

196 usually means “193 UN members + Vatican + Palestine + Taiwan” — used by sources that disagree with the UN's exclusion of Taiwan. 197 is 195 + Cook Islands + Niue. 204 and 206 are usually ISO-3166-adjacent counts that include some but not all territories and dependencies. The honest answer is that any count between 193 and 250 is defensible depending on the rules you're using.

Is Vatican City really a country?

Yes. It has its own government (the Holy See), legal system, flag, currency (it mints its own euros under an agreement with the EU), postal system, and diplomatic relations with over 180 countries. It's the smallest country in the world by both area and population, but it's a country in every legal sense. You can visit it in an afternoon — and about 6 million people do every year.

Does Scotland count as a separate country?

Not on the 195 list. Scotland is a “constituent country” of the United Kingdom — a country in the cultural and vocabulary sense, but not a sovereign state. On a travel map, you mark the United Kingdom, and Scotland is included within it.

Where is the official UN member state list?

Directly on the United Nations website.^[3] Each entry on the list includes the date of admission and the official name of the state. It's the most authoritative source for the 193-country number.

Why does My Travel Maps show Taiwan but count 195 including “China”?

The 195 number uses the UN's own classification boundary, which means Taiwan is absorbed into the “China” entry. But the interactive map itself displays Taiwan as a separate country so travelers can click it, because that's how it's experienced on the ground. The two facts sit uneasily beside each other — which is the natural state of every travel map of Taiwan.

Could the EU ever become a country?

In theory, federalization could produce a single “United States of Europe,” which would presumably replace its member states at the UN. In practice, the EU is an intensely debated political project, and full federalization is not on any near-term political agenda. For now, the EU is 27 separate UN member states plus the EU itself as a permanent observer (as an organization, not a state).

The bottom line

If someone asks “how many countries are there in the world?”, the honest answer is: it depends on who's counting, and why.

For a travel journal or a casual conversation, the answer is 195. That's the 193 UN member states plus Vatican City and Palestine — the two UN non-member observer states. It's the count used by Lonely Planet, National Geographic, most scratch maps, most travel-tracking tools, and us.

For strict legal accuracy, the answer is 193 — only full UN members count.

For global software, logistics, and banking systems, the answer is 249 — the ISO 3166-1 list of official country codes, which includes dependencies and territories.

All three are correct. All three serve different purposes. None of them will settle the argument about Taiwan or Kosovo, because those arguments aren't really about counting — they are about recognition and politics, and counting is a downstream consequence of those deeper disputes.

If you want to see how the 195 count plays out in practice — every country clickable, every continent countable, every edge case explicitly handled — try our countries visited map. And for the detailed reasoning behind how we draw every disputed border on the site, read the methodology page.