Countries Bordering The Highest Number Of Other Countries

Two countries in the world border 14 different sovereign states each. China and Russia together touch 24 unique neighbors, with three (Mongolia, Kazakhstan, North Korea) shared between them. Brazil is third at 10. Most of the world's countries do not come close: more than 40 are islands that border nobody at all, and a majority of those with any land border at all share frontiers with just one or two other states. Canada borders one. The United States borders two. The list below ranks every country that touches five or more by total count of distinct sovereign neighbors, using the figures from the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia's compiled list, which treat lakes and rivers as land borders but exclude purely maritime boundaries and connections that exist only through tunnels or causeways.

Jump straight to the full table of every country that borders five or more neighbors.

The Top: China And Russia (14 Each)

China and Russia are tied at the top with 14 sovereign neighbors apiece. China's 14 are Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Vietnam. The total length of China's land borders runs about 22,147 km (13,762 miles), the longest such system in the world. (China also borders Hong Kong and Macau, but both are Special Administrative Regions of China itself rather than separate sovereign states, so they do not count toward the 14.) Russia's 14 neighbors are Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, and Ukraine. Russia's total land border runs roughly 20,017 km (12,438 miles), second-longest in the world. The Russia-Kazakhstan border, at 6,846 km (4,254 miles), is the longest continuous border between any two countries on Earth, longer than the famously long Canada-US border at 8,891 km only if you count that one as a single continuous frontier rather than splitting it at Alaska. Russia and China share an additional 3,645-km border with each other, sometimes called the longest peaceful international frontier in continental Asia, though "peaceful" has done a lot of work over the past century.

Brazil (10)

Brazil is the only South American country in the top tier and the only country that borders ten others. The South American countries that do not border Brazil are Ecuador and Chile, which together cover only the western coast. Brazil's ten neighbors are Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, France (via French Guiana, an overseas department), Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The country covers about 3.3 million square miles, which is large enough that several of these borders sit thousands of kilometers from the Brazilian capital. The Brazil-Bolivia border alone runs 3,400 km, longer than the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.

The Nines: DR Congo And Germany

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the second-largest country in Africa and one of the most landlocked-feeling: it has only about 25 miles of Atlantic coastline at the Congo River's mouth, squeezed between Angola and the Republic of the Congo. Everything else is border. The DRC's nine sovereign neighbors are Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. (Until South Sudan's independence in July 2011, the DRC bordered Sudan; the split changed several African neighbor counts at once.) The total length of DRC's land borders runs roughly 10,730 km, longer than the equator of the planet Mercury.

Germany ties the DRC at nine, with a very different geography: where DRC sits across the Congo basin, Germany sits across the middle of Europe, sharing borders with Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. The total length of German land borders is about 3,621 km, less than a third of DRC's. Germany's borders are also unusually wiggly: the Germany-Belgium frontier is broken into six separate segments due to small enclaves, and the Germany-Netherlands frontier is one of the most regulated and surveyed in the European Union.

The Eight-Border Club (Seven Countries)

Seven countries border eight sovereign neighbors each: Austria, France (metropolitan only), Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Tanzania, Turkey, and Zambia. Saudi Arabia is the surprise of the group, since it is often overlooked in popular lists. The kingdom borders Bahrain (via a brief 196-meter land segment at Passport Island), Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The King Fahd Causeway is the more famous connection to Bahrain, but it is a causeway and does not count by the standard rules; the Passport Island land border does.

France's eight metropolitan neighbors are Andorra, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, Spain, and Switzerland. France and England do not share a land border. The Channel Tunnel runs under the seabed and does not qualify. If French overseas territories are included, the count rises to 11: French Guiana adds borders with Brazil and Suriname in South America, and Saint Martin adds a border with the Kingdom of the Netherlands' Sint Maarten in the Caribbean.

Austria is the smallest country in the eight-border club at about 84,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of South Carolina. Its eight neighbors (Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland) reflect Austria's position at the geographic crossroads of central Europe and the fragments of the former Habsburg empire. Liechtenstein, one of the world's tiny statelets, sits between Austria and Switzerland and counts as a border for both.

Turkey is the only country that touches eight neighbors across two continents. The European border is shared with Bulgaria and Greece in Thrace; the rest sit across Anatolia in Asia: Armenia, Azerbaijan (via the tiny Nakhchivan exclave), Georgia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Azerbaijan land border runs only 9 km, one of the shortest international borders in the world.

Serbia is the only landlocked country in Europe with eight neighbors (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Romania), a number that has gone up since the breakup of Yugoslavia and the independence of Montenegro in 2006. North Macedonia carried the "Macedonia" name until February 2019, when the country agreed to a rename as part of the Prespa Agreement with Greece.

Tanzania is one of three African countries in the eight-border club (with Zambia and now Saudi Arabia on the Africa-adjacent side of the count). Its neighbors are Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia. The Tanzania-DRC border runs almost entirely through Lake Tanganyika, the world's longest freshwater lake.

Zambia shares borders with Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. The most extraordinary of these is the Zambia-Botswana border at Kazungula, which is only about 155 meters long: the shortest land border between any two sovereign countries on Earth. The crossing is so short that the four nations meeting there (Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia) form what might be the closest thing in the world to a quadripoint. Strictly speaking it is not one. The actual borders are a sequence of three short tripoints arranged in close formation along the Zambezi River.

The Seven-Border Tier

Eight more countries border seven neighbors each: Algeria (Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia, Western Sahara), Hungary (Austria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine), Iran (Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan), Mali (Algeria, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal), Niger (Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Libya, Mali, Nigeria), Poland (Belarus, Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine), Sudan (Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, South Sudan), and Ukraine (Belarus, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia). The clustering in the Sahel (Algeria, Mali, Niger, Sudan) reflects how relatively few internal divisions the colonial boundary-makers drew across a very large region; the clustering in central Europe (Hungary, Poland, Ukraine) reflects the opposite, an unusually high density of small-to-mid-sized countries packed together.

The Full Table: Every Country That Borders Five Or More

Fifty sovereign countries border five or more others. The table below ranks them by neighbor count.

Note: Counts are by number of distinct sovereign neighbors, the standard metric. Bridges, tunnels, and causeways are excluded. Lakes and river boundaries count as land borders. France's overseas territories would push its count to 11 if included. The United Kingdom's overseas territories and Crown Dependencies similarly push its count to 3. The figures here follow the methodology of the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia's compiled list, which is also the closest thing the topic has to a settled standard.