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Landslides are generally associated with a trigger, such as an earthquake, a rapid snowmelt or a large storm. The landslide event can include a single landslide or many thousands. The frequency–area (or volume) distribution of a landslide event quantifies the number of landslides that occur at different sizes. We examine three well-documented landslide events, from Italy, Guatemala and the USA, each with a different triggering mechanism, and find that the landslide areas for all three are well approximated by the same three-parameter inverse-gamma distribution. For small landslide areas this distribution has an exponential ‘roll-over’and for medium and large landslide areas decays as a power-law with exponent− 2· 40. One implication of this landslide distribution is that the mean area of landslides in the distribution is independent of the size of the event. We also introduce a landslide-event magnitude scale mL …