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knbs data: State Department for Lands and Physical Planning ke.knbs.county-area.irregular irregular

Land and Water Area by County.

↗ source

VERSION v2026-09-07

UPDATED 20d ago

COVERAGE 2025 - 2025

SHAPE 145 × 5

SIZE 4.4 KB

FREQUENCY irregular

PIPELINE automated

LICENSE Not stated

SOURCE www.knbs.or.ke

How big each of Kenya's 47 counties is: land area, water area and their total in square kilometres, with a national row. The table states no reference year; 2025 is the Statistical Abstract edition it was read from, and the figures are the State Department for Lands and Physical Planning's.

Kenya is 610,000 square kilometres. The counties account for 591,971 of that, and the remaining 18,029 is terrestrial water, inland surface and ground water that belongs to no county. The national row carries all four figures so the two reconcile: the counties' land sums exactly to Kenya's 580,609, and their 11,362 of water plus the terrestrial 18,029 is Kenya's 29,391.

Marsabit is the largest county at 76,031 square kilometres and Mombasa the smallest at 216, a spread of 352 to one; six counties hold half the country's county area. Fifteen counties have any water area at all and 32 have none. Where there is water it is mostly one lake: Homa Bay is 43 per cent water and Siaya 31, both on Lake Victoria, and Marsabit and Turkana share Lake Turkana's 6,405.

This is a reference table rather than a series, published because its rows are keyed on the county names every other Kenyan county dataset joins on, so it is a denominator for anything per square kilometre. Note that ke.knbs.population.irregular also carries a land area per county, from the 2019 census geography. Set against the county boundary polygons the site's map draws, the two agree: this table's totals and the census's land figures each sit within about 1 per cent of the polygons for 40 of the 47 counties, and the rest are the counties with water, where the census prints land only and this table prints land and water separately. Three are not explained that way. Homa Bay's census land figure sits a sixth above this table's, so the census counts some of Lake Victoria as land. Migori's census figure, 2,613, is a fifth below both this table's 3,165 and the polygon, and is the outlier. And the boundary file draws the line between Kericho and Bomet differently from both publishers, though the pair's sum agrees. Neither dataset is corrected to the other; both are as printed.

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WHERE THE WATER IS

Lake Victoria makes Homa Bay two fifths water and Siaya nearly a third, while 32 of Kenya's 47 counties have no water area at all.

Water as a share of each county's area · per cent · 47 counties

SOURCE: State Department for Lands and Physical Planning · via Kenya National Bureau of Statistics · Land and Water Area by County · Updated 2026-09-07

BOUNDARIES: RCMRD GeoPortal · via geoBoundaries ADM1 · Public Domain

#	geography	geography_level	indicator	value	unit
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COLUMN	TYPE	DESCRIPTION	UNIT
geography	string	County name as ke.knbs.population.irregular publishes it, so the two join; or KENYA for the national row	-
geography_level	string	county or national	-
indicator	string	land_area, water_area or total_area for every county; the national row adds terrestrial_water_area, the 18,029 sq km of inland water that belongs to no county	-
value	float64	Square kilometres	-
unit	string	sq_km	-

CITATION · APA 7

State Department for Lands and Physical Planning. (2026). Land and Water Area by County [Data set] (Version 2026-09-07). Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, distributed by imibare. https://imibare.org/datasets/ke.knbs.county-area.irregular