We Counted the Pixels in 193 National Flags
Which color appears most on the world's flags? Rather than guess, we counted. We drew the flag of each of the 193 UN members[1] at the same size, sorted every pixel into a color family and worked out the areas. The images are the files this site uses, and our methodology page gives their sources.[2]
The results
We counted a flag as using a color if that color covers at least 1% of it.
| Color family | Flags using it | Share | Average area |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red | 151 | 78.2% | 30.5% |
| White | 136 | 70.5% | 17.6% |
| Yellow, gold, orange | 102 | 52.8% | 10.8% |
| Blue | 99 | 51.3% | 21.1% |
| Green | 86 | 44.6% | 14.9% |
| Black | 45 | 23.3% | 5.0% |
Red leads on both counts. It appears on more than three flags in four, and with every flag at the same size it covers over 30% of the total area. Only 42 flags fall below the 1% line for red.
Reading the two columns together shows something else. White is on 37 more flags than blue, yet blue covers more area. White tends to be a stripe or a small device, while blue is often the field. Yellow behaves the same way: three more flags than blue, about half the area.
Which color covers the most
Take the largest color on each flag and red wins 87 times, blue 38, green 30, white 20, the yellow family 14 and black 4.
These flags have the highest share of each color.
| Color family | Flags | Area |
|---|---|---|
| Red | China, Morocco | 97.5%, 97.0% |
| Blue | Micronesia, Somalia | 97.9%, 95.9% |
| Green | Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan | 96.6%, 83.7% |
| White | Cyprus, Japan | 86.8%, 81.0% |
South Korea's flag ranks third for white, at 78.6%. The rest is about 7.5% black, 6.6% red and 6.6% blue. People tend to remember the Taegukgi as a red and blue flag, but by area it is a white one.
How many colors does a flag use?
Counting our six families, three colors is the most common choice, on 85 flags.
| Color families used | Flags |
|---|---|
| 2 | 43 |
| 3 | 85 |
| 4 | 49 |
| 5 | 14 |
| 6 | 2 |
The two flags that use all six families are South Africa and South Sudan. No flag uses only one.
Eighteen flags use only red and white: Austria, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Georgia, Indonesia, Japan, Latvia, Malta, Monaco, Peru, Poland, Qatar, Singapore, Switzerland, Tonga, Tunisia and Türkiye. Twenty-six use only red, white and blue, among them the United States, France and the United Kingdom.
The limits of this count
Please keep the following in mind.
- These are the colors of images, not of laws. Many countries don't define their colors numerically, and the same flag varies slightly from one image to another.
- Sorting colors takes judgment. Qatar's maroon went into red. Gold and orange have no clear boundary, so both went into the yellow family.
- The 1% line matters a little. It doesn't affect a clean design like Greece's, but on a flag with a detailed coat of arms, small colors can fall on either side of it.
- Many flags tie for the largest color. On equal-striped flags such as France and Italy the areas match, so the order comes down to tiny differences at the edges.
- Only UN members are counted. Vatican City, Palestine, Taiwan, Kosovo and others aren't included. The count says nothing about the status of any flag or place.
- Meaning isn't measured. That many flags use a color doesn't mean it stands for the same thing on each of them. Countries explain the same red in different ways.
Sources
Read next
- Telling Look-Alike Flags Apart
How to tell apart twelve groups of confusable flags, from Nordic crosses and Pan-Arab colors to vertical tricolors, one difference at a time.
- Sources and Methodology
What data Flag Master uses, how each kind of fact is checked, and what has not been checked, with the numbers behind each claim.
This page was drafted with AI (Claude). Its facts were checked against the sources listed below, and the site owner read it before publication. Found a mistake? Please write to us and include a source: Contact