What would it cost to buy Greenland?

For more than a century, U.S. leaders have periodically floated the idea of acquiring Greenland, but President Donald Trump has revived the idea with a sense of urgency. He first raised it in 2019 during his first term and returned to it following his reelection in 2024. His administration has framed gaining control of the island as a national security priority tied to countering Russian and Chinese influence, access to critical minerals, and Arctic defense.

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Map of Greenland highlighting the major geographic regions and the locations of human settlement.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Refugio Mariscal

The push to acquire Greenland raises an obvious question: What would it cost the United States to purchase it?

Under a Cold War–era agreement signed in 1951, the U.S. already enjoys broad military access to Greenland. Although the U.S. has only one base, an agreement with Denmark allows American forces to build, maintain, and operate military facilities throughout the island, station personnel, and control military and civilian movements by air and sea.

Buying the island would be a different matter. Greenland is home to about 57,000 people, operates with broad self-rule, and has the legal right to pursue independence from Denmark. Greenland and Denmark both say the island is not available for purchase. Any hypothetical sale would need to involve political consent, governance, and long-term economic commitments, not just a transfer of territory.

U.S. history offers some perspective on what a hypothetical price tag might look like. The United States has expanded before through outright purchases, most famously the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Alaska Purchase in 1867. Those deals look astonishingly cheap by modern standards—generally landing in the hundreds of millions, not billions, of today’s dollars, according to MeasuringWorth’s “real price” (CPI-based) comparisons, which are adjusted for inflation.

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From sea to shining sea.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

But inflation-adjusted prices tell only part of the story. MeasuringWorth also allows historians to compare purchases based on their share of the U.S. economy at the time. By that measure, early land deals were far more consequential than their dollar figures suggest, representing meaningful slices of national output. In other words, they felt expensive—even if they don’t look that way today.

For example, the Louisiana Purchase’s $15 million price tag was about 3% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), then roughly $493 million. Applied to a U.S. economy of about $30.6 trillion in 2025, a purchase of comparable relative size would be roughly $90 billion.

But historical comparisons break down when applied to Greenland. An acquisition would be different in kind, not just scale. The island’s perceived value is tied less to settlement and more to strategy.

Strategic factors include Arctic military positioning, access to rare earth elements and other critical minerals, potential energy resources, and emerging shipping routes as climate change alters the Arctic landscape. Those factors didn’t meaningfully exist when the U.S. bought Alaska or Louisiana.

Over the past 220 years, the U.S. has acquired vast territories for sums that now seem modest. But any modern attempt to “price” Greenland would reflect a 21st-century world—one shaped by geopolitics, climate change, and global competition—making simple historical comparisons useful for context, but deeply misleading as estimates.