GTA 6 map vs GTA 5 map: an honest comparison
The two maps cannot be compared by area yet, because Rockstar has never published an area figure for either of them. What can be compared today is structure: Grand Theft Auto V gives one city, Los Santos, plus the Blaine County countryside around it, while Grand Theft Auto VI is set in the state of Leonida, which the official website describes through six separately named regions. That difference in shape is confirmed. The difference in size is not.
What is officially confirmed about each setting
Grand Theft Auto V shipped in September 2013 and is set in the state of San Andreas. The playable area holds the city of Los Santos in the south and Blaine County to the north, with a large stretch of ocean around the landmass. That structure has been stable across every re-release of the game since.
Grand Theft Auto VI is set in Leonida. Rockstar's official website names six regions: Vice City, Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Mount Kalaga and Ambrosia. The two official trailers, from December 2023 and May 2025, show city streets, beaches, wetland, open highway and long passages over water.
That is the whole confirmed comparison. One map has a documented layout because it has been playable for years. The other has a list of place names and two trailers.
Why the popular size numbers are not comparable
Search for either map and you will find confident areas in square miles. For Grand Theft Auto V those numbers came from players measuring the game after release; several different figures are in circulation, and they disagree because they count different things. Some include the ocean, some stop at the shoreline, some include the unreachable border terrain.
For Grand Theft Auto VI the numbers are worse than approximate. They are extrapolations from trailer footage, which cannot establish distance, and from comparisons with real Florida geography, which the game is inspired by rather than bound to.
Putting an approximate community measurement of one game next to a trailer-derived guess about another produces a comparison with no meaning. The two sides were not produced the same way, and neither side was produced by Rockstar.
Structure is a better comparison than area
Area is a poor proxy for how a map feels to play anyway. A large empty desert and a dense block of city can occupy the same number of square miles and behave nothing alike.
The useful axes are different:
- Number of distinct settlements. Grand Theft Auto V has one city and a handful of small towns. Leonida is described through six named regions, at least two of which read as separate population centres.
- Water. Grand Theft Auto V surrounds a single landmass with ocean. The Leonida material shows keys and wetland, which implies water inside the playable area rather than only around it.
- Vertical range. Grand Theft Auto V runs from seabed to Mount Chiliad. Leonida includes a location named Mount Kalaga, though nothing about its height has been stated.
- Travel time. The only number that will matter in practice, and the only one measurable after release.
Three of those four can already be reasoned about from official material. The fourth has to wait.
How this hub will compare them at release
Both maps live on this platform, which makes a like-for-like comparison possible in a way that cross-site numbers are not. The same measurement procedure will be applied to each:
- Coordinate extents of the playable area.
- A timed traverse on the same vehicle class at the same speed.
- A scaled stitch of our own in-game map screenshots.
- Three published areas per map: land only, land plus navigable water, and the full coordinate rectangle.
Same method, same boundary rules, same units. Anything else is not a comparison, it is two unrelated numbers printed near each other.
Preguntas frecuentes
- Is the GTA 6 map bigger than the GTA 5 map?
- Nobody outside Rockstar can answer that yet. No official area has been published for either map, and the community figures for the two were produced by different methods, so they cannot be set against each other.
- Does the GTA 6 map include the GTA 5 map?
- Rockstar has made no such statement. The official material places Grand Theft Auto VI in Leonida and says nothing about San Andreas being part of it. Claims to the contrary are rumour.
- How many cities are on the GTA 6 map?
- The official website names six regions of Leonida, of which Vice City is the one explicitly presented as a city. How many of the others contain towns of their own has not been stated.
- Why do different sites quote different sizes for the GTA 5 map?
- Because each measurement counts a different area. Including the ocean, stopping at the shoreline or including unreachable border terrain each produce a different result from the same map.