Flags with black

Where black flags are, by region

Black is most common in Africa, where 14 of 59 flags carry it. Across the whole dataset it appears on 38 of 250 flags, about 15 percent.

No flag in Antarctic carries black at the threshold used here.

What black is usually paired with

Of the 38 flags that include black, these are the colours it shares a flag with most often.

• Red: 31 flags (see every red flag)
• Green: 20 flags (see every green flag)
• White: 20 flags (see every white flag)
• Yellow: 11 flags (see every yellow flag)
• Blue: 9 flags (see every blue flag)
• Orange: 3 flags (see every orange flag)

3 of them are two-colour flags, where black is half the whole design.

How this list is defined

A flag is on this list when black covers at least 7 percent of its opaque area, measured at build time from the official public-domain SVG. That threshold is deliberate: it keeps outlines, anti-aliasing and the fine detail inside a coat of arms from counting as a colour of the flag, while still catching a genuine stripe or charge.

Two exceptions are built in. A very dark but strongly saturated colour keeps its hue instead of being called black, so a bottle green stays green. And red reaches into the crimson range, because a great many flag reds sit there. The full method is on the data page, so this is a claim you can check rather than one you have to take on trust.

What the method does not capture is layout. Two flags built from the same colour families can look nothing alike, so treat this as a colour index and not as a ruling on which flags resemble each other.

Frequently asked questions

Explore flags by another colour above, or browse every flag in the world.