Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources maps 116,803 lakes, ponds and reservoirs inside the state, from the Minnesota part of Lake of the Woods at 305,576 acres down to Nemo Pond in Isanti County at 0.004 acres. 14,174 of them cover 10 acres or more, and 3,055 cover 100 acres or more.
So the answer depends on where you draw the line. The table counts the same map nine ways.
| Counting | Lakes |
|---|---|
| Every lake, pond, reservoir and mine pit the DNR maps, any size | 116,803 |
| 1 acre or more | 43,470 |
| 10 acres or more | 14,174 |
| 10 acres or more, with a DNR lake number | 13,457 |
| 10 acres or more, with a name | 8,585 |
| 100 acres or more | 3,055 |
| One square mile (640 acres) or more | 500 |
| 1,000 acres or more | 299 |
| 10,000 acres or more | 16 |
Source: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, hydrography (lake, pond, reservoir and mine-pit lake classes), via the Metropolitan Council’s data mirror. Fetched 26 Oct 2026. Each lake counted once: a lake the DNR maps in bays counts as one; parts outside Minnesota and Lake Superior are left out.
None of these counts lands on 10,000. Counting lakes of 10 acres or more, the size line in the DNR’s own published figure, gives 14,174, about 42% more than 10,000. The figure nearest 10,000 is the count of lakes of 10 acres or more that have a name: 8,585. Moving the line by one acre moves the answer by hundreds: 988 lakes measure between 9 and 10 acres, and 719 between 10 and 11.
The DNR’s facts page gives 11,842 lakes of 10 acres or more; the page was last reviewed in 2013. It does not say how the lakes were counted, so we cannot reproduce that figure. In 2021, John A. Downing, director of Minnesota Sea Grant, counted 14,380 from the DNR’s database in a column titled “Minnesota: Land of How Many Lakes?”, which answers the 10,000 figure directly: “It definitely isn’t 10,000.” He kept Lake Superior in and dropped lakes that lie mostly in other states. Our count, by the rules above, is 206 lower than his.
His column gives the smallest waterbody in the database as Nemo Pond, Isanti County, at 0.004 acres. The map we fetched has the same pond at 0.0044 acres.
Minnesota DNR hydrography, fetched 26 Oct 2026; Minnesota DNR, Minnesota facts: water (dnr.state.mn.us), read 26 Oct 2026; J. A. Downing, Minnesota Sea Grant, 17 May 2021 (seagrant.umn.edu), read 26 Oct 2026.
Otter Tail County has the most lakes of 10 acres or more, 1,074, followed by St. Louis (1,064), Itasca (983) and Cass (790). The ten counties at the top hold 7,432 of the state’s 14,174, or 52%.
At the other end, the DNR’s facts page names four counties with no natural lakes: Mower, Olmsted, Pipestone and Rock. The map still has water bodies of 10 acres or more in each (Mower 7, Olmsted 16, Pipestone 2, Rock 7); the map’s lake class does not say whether a lake is natural, so they stay in the count.
Source: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, hydrography (lake, pond, reservoir and mine-pit lake classes), via the Metropolitan Council’s data mirror. Fetched 26 Oct 2026. A lake is counted in the county the DNR lists for it; the 662 lakes the map lists with no county are placed by their inside point within U.S. Census county lines.
Lakes of 10 acres or more cover 2,895,863 acres of Minnesota, about 4,525 square miles, not counting Lake Superior. The 16 lakes of 10,000 acres or more hold 38% of that; lakes under 1,000 acres hold 38%.
The largest lake partly in Minnesota is Lake of the Woods: 305,576 acres of it lie inside the state on the DNR map, against 307,010 on the DNR’s facts page. Of lakes wholly inside Minnesota, Red Lake is the largest at 283,813 acres; the map draws Upper and Lower Red Lake as one lake, and so does the facts page.
| Lake | County | Acres, DNR map | Acres, facts page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Lake | Beltrami | 283,813 | 288,800 |
| Mille Lacs Lake | Mille Lacs | 128,250 | 132,516 |
| Leech Lake | Cass | 103,444 | 111,527 |
| Lake Winnibigoshish | Cass | 56,471 | 58,544 |
| Vermilion Lake | St. Louis | 39,272 | 40,557 |
| Kabetogama Lake | St. Louis | 24,034 | 25,760 |
| Cass Lake | Beltrami | 15,958 | 15,596 |
| Lake Minnetonka | Hennepin | 14,206 | 14,004 |
| Otter Tail Lake | Otter Tail | 14,079 | 13,725 |
| Pelican Lake | St. Louis | 11,546 |
Mud Lake in Marshall County, on the facts page’s list at 23,700 acres, is classed as a wetland on the current map (13,970 acres), so it is not counted here as a lake. That opens the list to Pelican Lake (St. Louis County). Where both sources give an acreage, they differ; we print the map’s, because it is the one we can recount.
Counting only their Minnesota parts, four more border lakes would make this list: Rainy Lake (44,591 acres), Basswood Lake (14,071 acres), Lac la Croix (13,662 acres) and Namakan Lake (11,755 acres).
Source: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, hydrography (lake, pond, reservoir and mine-pit lake classes), via the Metropolitan Council’s data mirror. Fetched 26 Oct 2026. Facts page: Minnesota DNR, Minnesota facts: water, read 26 Oct 2026.
Of the 14,174 lakes of 10 acres or more, 8,585 have a name on the DNR map and 5,589 do not. The commonest name is Mud, on 177 lakes. The DNR map stores names without the word “lake”.
Mud 177 · Long 107 · Rice 76 · Bass 66 · Round 61 · Horseshoe 53 · Island 40 · Twin 38 · Johnson 37 · Clear 36
The DNR’s facts page lists its ten commonest names as Mud, Long, Rice, Bass, Round, Horseshoe, Twin, Island, Johnson and Spring. On today’s map, counting lakes of 10 acres or more, the first six come in the same order and nine of the ten are the same; Clear replaces Spring. The facts page does not say what size of lake it counted.
Source: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, hydrography (lake, pond, reservoir and mine-pit lake classes), via the Metropolitan Council’s data mirror. Fetched 26 Oct 2026. Facts page: Minnesota DNR, read 26 Oct 2026.
The count comes from the Minnesota DNR’s hydrography map, which draws every water body the agency recognises and gives each a class. We count the lake-or-pond, reservoir and mine-pit lake classes (46 mine-pit lakes and 32 reservoirs among the lakes of 10 acres or more). Wetlands, drained lakebeds, river polygons, sewage and tailings ponds are other classes and are not counted.
The map draws some big lakes twice: once whole and once as bays, as with Lake Minnetonka and Leech Lake. We count the whole lake once. A lake shared with Canada or a neighbouring state counts once, by its Minnesota part. Lake Superior is left out. The map holds 117,521 shapes in these classes; after those rules, 116,803 lakes remain.
Acreage is the area the DNR measured from its own outline of each lake. It is a map figure, not a survey of today’s shoreline. Our lake pages for Minnesota are listed on the Minnesota page.
Source: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, hydrography (lake, pond, reservoir and mine-pit lake classes), via the Metropolitan Council’s data mirror. Fetched 26 Oct 2026. Minnesota DNR data are used under the DNR General Data and Software License; not for navigation.