Turks and Caicos Islands 🇹🇨

The Turks and Caicos Islands sits in the Caribbean and is listed as a dependency rather than an independent state. Cockburn Town is the capital.

By land area it covers 948 km², which ranks it 191st of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind São Tomé and Príncipe and just ahead of Kiribati. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is around a quarter larger than Singapore.

Around 46,535 people live there, placing it 213th of 250 by population — between American Samoa above it and the Northern Mariana Islands below. Within the Caribbean alone it is the 10th largest of 28 and the 21st most populous.

Turks and Caicos Islands does not hold a United Nations seat of its own. It is administered as a dependency or overseas territory rather than as a sovereign state, which is why it sits outside the 193 member states while still appearing among the 250 entries on this site.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. Turks and Caicos Islands has 5 of the five markers of separate administration tracked on this page — its own currency, its own dialling code, its own internet domain, its own iso codes and a designated capital. In day-to-day terms it is run substantially as its own jurisdiction.

• Its own currencyUSD
• Its own dialling code+1649
• Its own internet domain.tc
• Its own ISO codestc / TCA
• A designated capitalCockburn Town

Its reference point sits at 21.8° north and 71.6° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,421 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include India, Mauritania and Myanmar.

There is no land frontier at all — every boundary it has is a coastline. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, so everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air.

Turks and Caicos Islands has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is Haiti, roughly 320 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Turks and Caicos Islands's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 49 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

People from the Turks and Caicos Islands are called Turks and Caicos Islanders.

English is the only official language. English is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 90 other entries including American Samoa, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda and Australia.

Inside the Americas it places 46th of 56 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Turks and Caicos Islands does not have the United States dollar to itself. It is one of 20 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is USD, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in USD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Turks and Caicos Islands among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Zoom in from the world to Caribbean and Turks and Caicos Islands sits 21st of 28 by population and 10th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Saint Kitts and Nevis just above and Sint Maarten just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Haiti is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Caribbean has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇰🇳 Saint Kitts and Nevis
• 🇸🇽 Sint Maarten
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

It uses the United States dollar ($, USD). That is a shared currency: 19 other entries use it, including American Samoa, the Bahamas, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands and Cambodia.

The top-level domain is .tc. The international dialling code is +1649. Its ISO codes are tc and TCA, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Cockburn Town is the city to remember for this territory.

It does not hold a UN seat of its own. The dataset does not record which state administers it, so this page does not guess. Of the 250 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.