Flags by the numbers

Red is on 152 of the 197 national flags, more than any other colour. Most flags are 2:3, two are square, and one isn't a rectangle at all.

Computed from the site’s dataLast checked 17 October 2026Suggest a correction

The 45 countries whose flags have no red.

We measured every national flag the site shows: its proportions, and how much of it is each colour, sorting every pixel into one of a handful of colour families.^[1] A colour counts as on a flag when it covers at least 2% of it.^[1]

The colours

Red is the most common colour, on 152 flags, then white on 133 and blue on 103.^[1] Red also covers the most cloth: put all 197 flags side by side and 30% of the area is red, 22% blue and 18% white.^[1]

Orange is rare, on twelve flags, including the saffron stripes of India, Niger and Ireland or the orange half of Bhutan's.^[1] No flag is even 2% purple.^[1]

#	Colour	Flags	Share of all flag area
1	Red	152	30%
2	White	133	18%
3	Blue	103	22%
4	Yellow	87	10%
5	Green	81	14%
6	Black	46	5%
7	Orange	12	1%

Light blues count as blue and maroons as red. Shares are of all 197 flags' area put together, each flag counted the same size.

The most of each

Saudi Arabia's flag is the greenest, 96% green; China's is the reddest, at 97%.^[1] The whitest is Afghanistan's, 89% white, and the bluest Micronesia's.^[1]

#	Colour	Flag with the most	Share of the flag
1	Red	China	97%
2	White	Afghanistan	89%
3	Blue	Micronesia	98%
4	Yellow	Brunei	55%
5	Green	Saudi Arabia	96%
6	Black	Libya	49%
7	Orange	Bhutan	42%

How many colours

South Africa's flag has the most colours, six: red, white, blue, green, yellow and black.^[1] Thirteen flags have five.^[1]

At the other end, 49 flags make do with two colours, among them Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Poland, Türkiye and Saudi Arabia.^[1]

Shapes

Flags are less standard in shape than they look. 26 different proportions are in use; 2:3, the shape of France's flag, is the most common, on 86 flags, followed by 1:2, the United Kingdom's, on 54.^[1]

Switzerland and Vatican City have square flags.^[1] The widest is Qatar's, at 11:28, and Nepal's is the only one taller than it is wide: two stacked pennants rather than a rectangle.^[1]

Flag of Algeria — The ten most common. Flags show the first three countries with each.

#	Proportions (height:width)	Flags
1	2:3	86
2	1:2	54
3	3:5	18
4	5:8	5
5	3:4	4
6	10:19	4
7	4:7	3
8	1:1	2
9	8:11	2
10	5:7	2

How we counted

Each flag is the image the site shows: flagcdn.com's vector flags, except Afghanistan's, where flagcdn still has the old tricolour and the site shows the current white flag from Wikimedia Commons.^[1]^[2] Proportions are the image's width and height.^[1]

Colours were measured by drawing each flag 480 pixels wide and sorting every pixel by hue and lightness into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white or black, so a dark maroon counts as red and a sky blue as blue.^[1] Thin outlines and small details in crests fall under the 2% line and don't count.^[1]

Sources

[1]
Country flags in SVG · Flagpedia, flagcdn.com
The national flags the site shows, measured by scripts/build-flag-stats.ts.
[2]
Flag of the Taliban.svg · Wikimedia Commons

More by the numbers

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