How Many Countries Are in North America?

23. North America has 23 sovereign countries — a settled, uncontested figure. What that number hides is that the map it describes is one of the youngest on Earth, and it was laid over a far older one.

The 23 stretch from Canada and the United States down through Central America to Panama, and out across the islands of the Caribbean. The count itself is not in dispute. But “how many countries” quietly assumes that a country is one of these modern states — and on this continent more than any other, that assumption is doing a lot of work. Two centuries ago almost none of these 23 existed. The nations that did are mostly still here.

Below: a tool to rank all 23 by land area and population, a second widget that looks beneath the modern map at the Indigenous nations, and a game to test whether you can name a country from its outline.

Most of the 23 are small island states

The figure of 23 is carried by small countries. Three giants — Canada, the United States and Mexico — hold the overwhelming majority of the continent’s land and people. Seven more make up Central America. The remaining 13, more than half the entire count, are island nations of the Caribbean, several with fewer people than a mid-sized town. Saint Kitts and Nevis, the smallest, would fit into Canada about forty thousand times over. The continent’s country count is high mostly because the Caribbean is broken into so many small pieces.

The modern map is barely two centuries old

Almost none of the 23 is old. Mexico became independent in 1821. The Central American states broke from Spain and then from each other in the 1820s and 1830s, as the Federal Republic of Central America came apart. Most of the Caribbean nations are far younger still: Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, and the newest country on the continent, Saint Kitts and Nevis, only in 1983. A visitor from 1800 would recognise almost nothing of today’s political map of North America.

The nations that were already here

If the modern map is two centuries old, the human map is far older. Long before any of the 23, North America was home to hundreds of Indigenous nations — and, crucially, many of them are still nations in law today, with their own governments and a recognised political status. Counting them gives a completely different answer to “how many nations.” Tap through the continent’s three largest countries below to see what sits underneath each one.

Add the figures together — 575 tribal nations in the United States, 634 First Nations in Canada, 68 Indigenous peoples in Mexico, and more across Central America, including the Maya nations who are a plurality of Guatemala’s population — and the continent holds well over a thousand nations beside its 23 states. They are not a historical footnote; they are a parallel and living map.

The Caribbean is the exception

The widget’s fourth entry tells the harder half of the story. The Caribbean was where European contact began, in 1492, and the Indigenous peoples of the islands — the Taíno, the Kalinago and others — were largely destroyed within decades by disease and violence. Across most of the Caribbean the older map was not layered under the new one, the way it was on the mainland; it was erased. The survival of the Kalinago Territory on Dominica is the exception that marks how complete the loss was elsewhere.

How many countries are in North America? Twenty-three. How many nations? That depends entirely on whether you start counting in 1492 — or long before it.

Can you name them by shape?

Eleven North American countries shown as outlines only, five names to choose from each time. Cuba and Mexico are unmistakable — the Central American countries are trickier than you would expect.