Coordinates to country

What it’s for

Quickly check points from a GPS, a camera or a spreadsheet; find out which country a ship or a buoy is off; or settle questions like the example. Little Diomede, in the Bering Strait, belongs to Alaska, while Big Diomede, about 3 miles west, is Russian, with the International Date Line running between them.

Most of all, it catches mistakes. When one point in a list of customers, photos or field sites lands on another continent, it’s almost always a swapped order or a missing minus sign, and you see it right away.

Typical mistakes, worked out

Here’s what happens to correctly typed coordinates and to the most common slips:

Looked up with this tool on October 31, 2026.

When the first number can’t be a latitude (it’s beyond 90, like -122 for Seattle), we swap the pair back and tell you. For New York both numbers could be latitudes, so a swap only shows up in the result.

What you get besides the country

The country comes with its two-letter ISO code and, under it, the places that contain the point: city, county and state in the US; town, municipality, province and autonomous community in Spain; and elsewhere the town and region from the nearest OpenStreetMap address. The country’s outline is drawn on the map so you can see where the point sits within it.

“Copy details” puts all of that on your clipboard as text, and “Share” gives you a link that reopens the same point, handy when you’re asking a colleague to double-check a suspicious row in a spreadsheet.

How the country is decided

We try the sources in this order, from the most precise to the most general:

• In the US, the Census Bureau’s state boundaries (TIGERweb).
• In Spain, the official municipal boundaries of the IGN, accurate to about 36 feet.
• Elsewhere, the country of the nearest OpenStreetMap address, if it’s within about 1,000 feet.
• If there’s none, Natural Earth’s 1:10 million country outlines, accurate to about a third of a mile, with two-thirds of a mile (1 km) of leeway around them.
• If the point is in no country and near none, it’s at sea.

Edge cases

Tiny countries. Monaco (43.7384, 7.4246) and San Marino (43.9356, 12.4473) come back correctly. In Vatican City, the simplified outline has almost no detail, so the nearest address decides: if the OpenStreetMap lookup fails, a point there may come back as Italy.

The 180th meridian. Crossing it, longitude jumps from +180 to -180. A point on Taveuni at 179.98° west (-16.84, -179.98) is Fiji, like the rest of the country, which lies on the other side of the line, at east longitudes. Little Diomede shows up as Diomede, Nome Census Area, Alaska.

Antarctica and the open sea. A point by McMurdo Station (-77.85, 166.67) returns Antarctica. Out at sea you get “At sea”, even within a country’s 12-nautical-mile territorial waters.

Disputed areas. We follow Natural Earth, which draws who controls each area in practice; it isn’t a political position.