Coldest Country in the World: Rankings, Records and Capitals

Talking about the coldest country in the world is a little complicated, and the reason is not that nobody has measured it. The reason is that “coldest” can mean four different things, and each one produces a different winner.

Everyone knows Antarctica holds the record for the lowest temperature ever measured on Earth. But Antarctica is not a country. It is a continent governed by international treaty, with no permanent population and no government, so it sits outside this comparison however cold it gets.

Among actual countries, Russia and Canada lead by most measures, with Mongolia close behind and arguably ahead on one of them. Which sits at the top depends entirely on what you are measuring.

Four Ways to Measure “Coldest”

This is where most lists go wrong. They pick one number and present it as the answer, and the answer changes completely if you pick a different one.

Metric	What it measures	Usual answer
Mean annual temperature	Average across the whole year, whole country	Russia or Canada
Lowest recorded temperature	The single coldest reading ever taken	Antarctica, then Russia
Coldest inhabited place	Where people actually live year-round	Russia (Oymyakon, Verkhoyansk)
Coldest capital city	Where a nation governs itself from	Mongolia (Ulaanbaatar)

Why mean annual temperature is the fairest measure

A single record low tells you about one extraordinary day. It says very little about what living there is actually like.

Mean annual temperature averages everything across the whole territory and the whole year, which makes it the closest thing to a fair comparison between countries. It is also why large countries with enormous latitude ranges, like Russia and Canada, end up near the top: vast northern territory pulls the national average down even though the southern parts are temperate.

Why that measure also distorts things

Here is the problem with it, though. Both Russia and Canada contain regions that are genuinely mild. Sochi on the Black Sea has a subtropical climate. Vancouver rarely sees serious snow. Averaging those in with Siberia and Nunavut produces a number that describes no actual place.

Mongolia is the opposite case. It is smaller, entirely landlocked, sits at high elevation, and has no mild coastal region to lift the average. What you get is a country where the cold is more uniform across its territory, even if the national mean is not the very lowest.

Antarctica: Cold, But Not a Country

Worth addressing properly, because it is the first thing most people think of.

Antarctica recorded -89.2°C at Vostok Station in July 1983, the lowest air temperature ever reliably measured at ground level on Earth. Satellite studies of the high plateau have since suggested even lower surface temperatures in isolated pockets, though those are surface readings rather than standard air measurements.

Nothing in any inhabited country comes close to that.

But Antarctica has no permanent population. The people there are scientists and support staff on rotation, living in research stations, typically for a season or a year. It has no government, no citizens, and no sovereign territory in the ordinary sense. The continent is administered under the Antarctic Treaty System, which sets aside competing territorial claims and reserves the continent for peaceful scientific use.

So it has a flag of sorts, representing a geographical area rather than a political one. That distinction is why it is excluded from any list of countries, however cold it gets.

The Ranked List

Ranked by approximate mean annual temperature. Figures vary between sources depending on the dataset and the period averaged, so treat these as indicative of the order rather than exact.

Rank	Country	Approx. mean annual	Record low
1	Russia	Around -5°C	About -68°C
2	Canada	Around -5.5°C	-63°C
3	Mongolia	Around -1°C	About -55°C
4	Finland	Around 2°C	-51.5°C
5	Iceland	Around 2°C	-38°C
6	Norway	Around 2°C	-51.4°C
7	Kazakhstan	Around 6°C	About -57°C
8	Sweden	Around 3°C	-52.6°C
9	Estonia	Around 6°C	-43.5°C
10	Kyrgyzstan	Around 3°C	About -54°C

Notice how the two columns disagree. Kazakhstan has a much warmer national average than Finland, yet a far lower record. That is continentality at work: a landlocked country with no maritime moderation swings further in both directions, hot summers and brutal winters, which averages out to something unremarkable.

Greenland sits outside this list for the same reason as Antarctica, though less absolutely. It is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark rather than an independent state. By any climate measure it would rank at or near the top, with a record low around -66°C.

Russia

Possessing the coldest inhabited places on Earth, Russia is the usual answer when people ask this question, and by most metrics it is the right one.

The country spans eleven time zones, and Siberia dominates the climate picture. Extreme low readings clustered in Yakutia have reached around -68°C, with the record contested between Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon depending on which measurement standards you accept.

What makes Siberia distinctive is not just the depth of the cold but its persistence. Permafrost covers a substantial share of Russian territory, ground that remains frozen year-round, which changes everything about how buildings are constructed and how infrastructure is laid.

Climate change is very influential here, and in ways that create problems rather than relief. Thawing permafrost destabilises foundations, buckles roads, and releases stored greenhouse gases. Heatwaves and floods have both increased in regions historically defined by cold.

Our article on how cold Russia gets covers the climate, the central heating systems, and the engineering responses in detail.

Canada

The everyday national average sits around -5.6°C, which puts Canada in direct competition with Russia for the top spot.

Canada’s climate is shaped by geography in an unusual way. The country is both wide and tall, covering an enormous latitude range, which means it is not simply cold. Some regions get genuinely hot in summer, and they do not represent the opposite extreme at all so much as a completely different climate within the same borders.

No wonder the climate has its own system that is difficult to predict. When winter begins in a given month one year, it will not be the same the next. It might arrive sooner or later. Does that leave weather forecasters with little to do? Quite the opposite, in fact, forecasters in Canada are among the busiest anywhere.

The lowest reading recorded in Canada was -63°C at Snag, Yukon, in February 1947, which remains the North American record.

Our article on Canada’s climate goes into the regional variation in more depth.

Mongolia

Mongolia deserves more attention than it usually receives in these lists, because by one meaningful measure it wins outright.

Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital city in the world, with winter temperatures regularly falling to around -40°C and a mean annual temperature below freezing. No other national capital experiences anything comparable.

That matters more than it might seem. A capital is where a country concentrates its population, its government, and its infrastructure. Russia and Canada both contain places far colder than Ulaanbaatar, but neither governs itself from one.

Why Mongolia is so cold

Four factors compound.

Elevation. Much of the country sits well above 1,000 metres, and Ulaanbaatar itself is around 1,300 metres. Temperature falls with altitude.

Landlocked position. No coastline anywhere, so no maritime influence to moderate the extremes. Water stores and releases heat slowly, which is why coastal places have milder winters than inland places at the same latitude. Mongolia has none of that.

The Siberian High. A persistent high-pressure system settles over the region through winter, bringing clear skies and still air. Clear nights radiate heat away rapidly, and without wind to mix the air, cold pools near the ground.

Latitude. Mongolia sits far enough north to receive limited winter solar energy, though this matters less than the other three.

The dzud

Mongolia has a word for a phenomenon most countries do not need one for. A dzud is a severe winter event in which livestock cannot reach grazing, either because snow is too deep, because ice has sealed the ground, or because a dry summer left insufficient forage before winter arrived.

For a country where a large share of the rural population depends on herding, a dzud is not an inconvenience but a livelihood catastrophe. Millions of animals have been lost in severe years.

Urban air quality is the other consequence of Mongolian cold. Ulaanbaatar has some of the worst winter air pollution of any capital, largely because households in the ger districts burn coal and other solid fuel for heating through a long, cold, still winter when nothing disperses the smoke.

Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is a study in what continentality does to a climate.

The national mean annual temperature is around 6°C, which sounds unremarkable. But the country swings enormously: summers reach well above 30°C and winters drop below -40°C in the north, with a record around -57°C.

Astana is the second-coldest capital city in the world, after Ulaanbaatar. Winter temperatures there commonly sit around -20°C for weeks at a time, and the city was purpose-built as a capital in a location where the cold was a known and accepted constraint.

Like Mongolia, Kazakhstan is landlocked, far from any moderating ocean, and exposed to the same Siberian air masses that dominate Central Asian winters.

Greenland

Not a country, but impossible to leave out of a discussion about cold.

Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own government handling most domestic matters while Denmark retains responsibility for foreign affairs and defence. That status keeps it off lists of sovereign states.

Climatically it would rank at the top of almost any of them. The ice sheet covers roughly 80% of the island, reaching over three kilometres thick in places, and the interior plateau records temperatures that rival Antarctica. The lowest reading, around -66°C, was recorded at a research station on the ice sheet in 1954.

The inhabited settlements sit almost entirely on the coastal fringe, where the sea moderates conditions considerably. Nuuk, the capital, has winter averages around -8°C, which is cold but nothing like the interior.

Greenland is also where climate change is most visible. Ice sheet melt has accelerated measurably, and it is one of the largest single contributors to global sea level rise.

The Nordic Countries

Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland all appear on cold-country lists, and there is a pattern worth understanding in how they differ.

Finland

Southern Finland sees winter temperatures between 0°C and -10°C, while Lapland regularly reaches -30°C or lower. The record is -51.5°C, set in Lapland in 1999.

What distinguishes Finland is less the depth of the cold than the length of the season combined with winter darkness. Our guide to how cold Finland gets covers the seasons, the regional differences, and how Finnish buildings are heated.

Norway

Norway presents an interesting contradiction. It extends further north than almost any inhabited territory, yet its coast is remarkably mild for the latitude.

The reason is the North Atlantic Current, which carries warm water up the Norwegian coast and keeps ports ice-free at latitudes where you would expect permanent sea ice. Tromsø, well inside the Arctic Circle, has milder winters than many places far to the south in continental Europe.

Inland is another matter. The record of -51.4°C was set at Karasjok in the interior of Finnmark, where the maritime influence does not reach.

Sweden

Similar pattern to Finland, with a milder south and a genuinely cold north. The record stands at -52.6°C, recorded in 1966.

Sweden is also one of the countries where district heating is most developed, supplying a large share of urban buildings from central plants rather than individual boilers.

Iceland

Iceland is colder in reputation than in fact, and the North Atlantic Current is again why. Winter temperatures in Reykjavík hover close to freezing rather than plunging, milder than many places on mainland Europe at lower latitudes.

The record, -38°C, is modest by the standards of this list. What Iceland does have is wind, persistent cloud, and weather that changes with remarkable speed.

It also has an energy situation unlike anywhere else. Geothermal resources supply the overwhelming majority of Icelandic heating, drawn from volcanic activity beneath the island, which makes it one of the few countries where heating is both abundant and almost entirely renewable.

The Baltic States and Eastern Europe

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania experience genuine continental winters, with Estonia recording -43.5°C. Their Baltic coastlines provide some moderation, but far less than the Atlantic does for Norway.

Further south, Poland sits at the transition between maritime and continental influence, which is why its winters vary so much year to year. Germany shows the same pattern with a milder west and colder east.

Countries That Are Colder Than People Expect

A few surprises, which is part of why this question is more interesting than a simple ranking suggests.

The United States contains some of the coldest inhabited territory outside Russia. Alaska recorded -62°C, and the continental interior regularly experiences severe cold. Our article on the coldest regions of the USA covers this.

China rarely appears on cold lists, yet Mohe in Heilongjiang province has recorded below -50°C, and the northeast experiences winters comparable to Siberia.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are mountainous rather than Arctic, but altitude produces cold that rivals far northern countries. Both have recorded readings beyond -50°C.

Argentina and Chile reach genuinely low temperatures in the far south and in the Andes, with Argentina recording around -39°C. Southern Hemisphere landmasses do not extend far enough toward the pole to produce Siberian conditions, but Patagonia comes closer than most people assume.

Countries That Are Warmer Than People Expect

The reverse is also true, and it usually comes down to ocean currents.

Ireland sits at the same latitude as Newfoundland, where winters are severe, yet rarely sees hard frost. The Atlantic does the work. Our article on Ireland’s moderate climate explains the mechanism.

The United Kingdom is the same story. London lies further north than Calgary, and their winters are not remotely comparable.

France spans Mediterranean warmth and Alpine cold within one country, which makes national averages nearly meaningless. See how cold France gets.

The Coldest Inhabited Places

Country-level averages hide the extremes. If the question is where people actually endure the coldest conditions, the answer narrows to a handful of settlements.

Place	Country	Note
Oymyakon	Russia	Claims the coldest permanently inhabited settlement
Verkhoyansk	Russia	Disputes the same claim, similar records
Yakutsk	Russia	Coldest city of significant size
Norilsk	Russia	One of the northernmost large cities
Ulaanbaatar	Mongolia	Coldest national capital
Yellowknife	Canada	Coldest Canadian city of its size
Fairbanks	USA	Extreme continental interior cold

Yakutsk is the case worth examining in detail, because it is not a remote outpost but a functioning city of a few hundred thousand people operating through winters that most infrastructure is not designed to survive. Our article on the coldest city in the world covers how that works.

The Lowest Temperatures Ever Recorded

Location	Temperature	Year
Vostok Station, Antarctica	-89.2°C	1983
Verkhoyansk / Oymyakon, Russia	About -68°C	1892 / 1933
Ice sheet station, Greenland	About -66°C	1954
Snag, Yukon, Canada	-63°C	1947
Prospect Creek, Alaska, USA	-62°C	1971
Northern Kazakhstan	About -57°C	1893

Two caveats belong with any table like this. Historical measurements from the 1890s were taken with equipment and protocols that differ from modern standards, which is part of why the Russian record is contested between two settlements. And official records depend on having a weather station present, so genuinely colder places may simply never have been measured.

How People Actually Live in These Places

Clothes are not enough to keep bodies warm at these temperatures. Reading the data, people elsewhere might reasonably wonder how anyone survives. There is an invisible blanket that humans have built with science and engineering, and a robust heating system is what turns a house in Yakutsk into a comfortable place rather than a shelter.

District heating

Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and the Nordic countries all rely heavily on district heating, where hot water is supplied through insulated pipe networks from a central plant rather than each building producing its own heat.

At scale this makes sense. Central plant achieves efficiencies individual boilers cannot, buildings need no flue or fuel storage, and when the plant changes fuel the entire network decarbonises at once. The limitation is that it only works where a network exists, and building one is a municipal-scale undertaking.

Building fabric

In extremely cold climates, the building envelope does more work than the heating system. Thick insulation, triple or quadruple glazing, and rigorous air sealing reduce heat demand to a level that heating equipment can realistically meet.

The Nordic countries lead here, and their building standards are among the most demanding anywhere. In a long heating season, insulation pays back faster than it does in a mild climate, which is why the economics support standards that would look excessive elsewhere.

Permafrost construction

Where the ground is permanently frozen, buildings are raised on piles driven deep into it rather than sitting on conventional foundations. The gap beneath allows cold air to circulate, which prevents heat from the building thawing the ground it stands on.

If that ground thaws, it loses bearing capacity and the structure subsides. As permafrost warms with the climate, this has become a genuine engineering crisis across northern Russia, Canada, and Alaska, affecting buildings, pipelines, roads, and runways built on an assumption that no longer holds.

Underfloor heating

Installing a water underfloor heating system with hot water pipes is one of the key elements in maintaining warmth in these climates, and there are reasons beyond comfort.

Heat is delivered from the entire floor rather than a single radiator, which produces even temperatures across a room instead of a hot zone near the emitter and a cold one by the window. In a building where the temperature difference between inside and outside might exceed 50°C, that evenness matters considerably.

There is a comfort dimension too. In a place where floors would otherwise be genuinely cold underfoot for six months of the year, a warm floor changes how a room feels in a way a wall-mounted radiator does not.

The cold in Russia and Canada is not something to worry about, in the sense that both have developed proper and reliable heating systems. Whichever country tops the list, what matters is that people handle it well.

Can Heat Pumps Work in Extreme Cold?

A reasonable question, and one where the answer has changed considerably in the last decade.

An air source heat pump extracts heat from outdoor air. That works even below freezing, because air above absolute zero contains extractable heat and the refrigerant inside the unit is colder still. What changes as temperature drops is how much heat is available, and therefore how much output the unit can deliver.

Older units struggled below freezing, which is where the objection comes from. Modern cold-climate models are a different proposition. Legom air source heat pumps are engineered to keep operating at ambient temperatures down to -35°C.

Two design elements make that possible. A full DC inverter compressor raises its speed to compensate as available heat falls, sustaining output where a fixed-speed unit simply cannot. And demand-based defrosting clears frost from the outdoor heat exchanger only when frost is actually detected, avoiding the frequent ineffective cycles that undermine cold-weather comfort in simpler designs.

The practical point for most of the countries in this article is that the old assumption no longer holds. Finland, Sweden, and Norway have among the highest heat pump adoption rates in Europe, and they did not reach that position by ignoring their winters.

Climate Change in the Coldest Places

Cold regions are warming faster than the global average, and the consequences are not straightforwardly positive.

Permafrost thaw destabilises infrastructure built on the assumption of permanently frozen ground, and it releases carbon and methane stored for millennia.

Sea ice loss changes regional weather patterns and affects wildlife that depends on it.

Greater variability rather than simply milder weather. Some research suggests a warming Arctic may destabilise the polar vortex, producing outbreaks of extreme cold in mid-latitude regions that historically saw less of it.

The worst effects are ecosystem disruption and species loss, both of which are already measurable. For countries whose economies and cultures are built around cold, the change is disorienting rather than welcome.

“What people find hard to believe is that the technology works at all in those places. We rate our units to minus thirty-five, and that genuinely covers most of where people live in cold countries, including all of Finland and most of Canada’s population. Where I would be careful is the extreme end. Oymyakon in January is not a heat pump application, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling rather than advising. The honest position is that the technology has moved a long way and it now covers far more than it used to, not that it covers everything.”
— Maggie Shen, Director of Legom

Heating Components for Cold Climates

Legom manufactures air-to-water heat pumps from 5 kW to 16 kW, rated to -35°C ambient, alongside the complete hydronic system: manifolds, floor heating pipe with oxygen barrier protection, thermal actuators, room thermostats, and HVAC valves including freeze protection valves for exposed pipework.

All are produced at our facility in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, and we export to distribution partners across cold-climate markets including Russia, Poland, and the Nordic countries. OEM and ODM services are available across the range.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the coldest country in the world?

It depends on the measure. By mean annual temperature, Russia and Canada are closely matched at the top, both around -5°C. By the coldest place people actually inhabit, Russia wins through Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk. By capital city, Mongolia wins outright, since Ulaanbaatar is the coldest national capital anywhere. Antarctica holds the absolute record at -89.2°C but is not a country, having no permanent population, government, or sovereign status.

Is Antarctica the coldest country?

Antarctica is the coldest place on Earth but it is not a country. It is a continent governed under the Antarctic Treaty System, which sets aside territorial claims and reserves it for peaceful scientific use. There is no permanent population, no government, and no citizenship. The people there are researchers and support staff on rotation. Its flag represents a geographical area rather than a political one, which is why it falls outside any list of countries.

Which is colder, Russia or Canada?

The two are remarkably close on national averages, and which appears ahead depends on the dataset and period used. The competition is genuinely tight, and readings that fluctuate year to year sometimes put one ahead and sometimes the other. Where Russia pulls clear is at the extreme: Siberian settlements record temperatures around -68°C, well below Canada’s record of -63°C at Snag, Yukon, and Russia contains the coldest permanently inhabited places on Earth.

What is the coldest capital city in the world?

Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, by a considerable margin. Winter temperatures regularly reach around -40°C and the mean annual temperature sits below freezing. Astana in Kazakhstan is second. This is a distinct measure from the coldest country, because Russia and Canada both contain places far colder than Ulaanbaatar but govern themselves from cities with much milder climates.

Why is Mongolia so cold despite not being Arctic?

Four factors compound. High elevation, with much of the country above 1,000 metres and Ulaanbaatar around 1,300. A completely landlocked position, so no ocean moderates the temperature. The Siberian High, a persistent winter high-pressure system bringing clear skies and still air that lets heat radiate away and cold pool near the ground. And a latitude far enough north to limit winter solar energy. Together these produce cold comparable to far more northerly places.

What is the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth?

-89.2°C at Vostok Station in Antarctica in July 1983, which remains the lowest air temperature reliably measured at ground level. Satellite studies of the Antarctic plateau have suggested even lower surface temperatures in isolated pockets, though those are surface readings rather than standard air measurements taken under meteorological protocols, so they are not directly comparable.

Why is Greenland not on lists of coldest countries?

Because it is not an independent country. Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own government handling domestic matters while Denmark retains foreign affairs and defence. Climatically it would rank at or near the top of any list, with an ice sheet covering roughly 80% of the island and a record low around -66°C. Inhabited settlements sit on the coastal fringe, where the sea moderates conditions considerably.

Why is Norway milder than its latitude suggests?

The North Atlantic Current, which carries warm water up the Norwegian coast and keeps ports ice-free at latitudes where permanent sea ice would otherwise be expected. Tromsø, well inside the Arctic Circle, has milder winters than places far to its south in continental Europe. Inland is different: the record of -51.4°C was set at Karasjok in interior Finnmark, where the maritime influence does not reach.

Do heat pumps work in very cold countries?

Modern cold-climate units work far better than their reputation suggests. Legom air source heat pumps are engineered to operate down to -35°C ambient, which covers Finland, most of Scandinavia, Poland, and the populated parts of Canada. Output does decline as temperature falls, which applies to every air source unit, so systems should be sized against the local design temperature. In genuinely extreme locations such as interior Siberia, district heating, ground source, or hybrid arrangements remain more appropriate.

Which country has the coldest inhabited place?

Russia. Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk, both in the Sakha Republic, dispute the title of coldest permanently inhabited settlement, with recorded lows around -68°C. Yakutsk, also in Sakha, is the coldest city of significant size anywhere, operating as a functioning urban centre of several hundred thousand people through winters that most infrastructure is not designed to withstand.

Why do landlocked countries get colder winters?

Because water moderates temperature and land does not. The sea stores heat through summer and releases it slowly through winter, keeping coastal areas milder than inland places at the same latitude. A landlocked country has none of that buffering, so it swings further in both directions: hotter summers and colder winters. This is why Kazakhstan has a warmer annual average than Finland yet a far lower record temperature.

Is climate change making cold countries warmer?

On average yes, and faster than the global rate, but the consequences are not straightforwardly beneficial. Permafrost thaw destabilises buildings, roads, and pipelines built on ground assumed to stay frozen, while releasing stored carbon and methane. Sea ice loss disrupts regional weather and wildlife. And some research suggests a warming Arctic may destabilise the polar vortex, producing extreme cold outbreaks in mid-latitude regions. The dominant effect for cold countries is greater variability rather than simple mildness.

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Reviewed by Maggie Shen, Director at Legom, on September 14, 2026. This article was reviewed for accuracy, including the distinction between measurement methods for ranking cold climates, the political status of Antarctica and Greenland, and verified heat pump cold-climate operating limits.