National Forest Inventories (NFIs) have been used in many countries to assess forest resources at the national level. To facilitate the estimation of forest growing stock volume at more regional scales, the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) technique was applied in this research to obtain estimates for unmeasured areas by using NFI field data and optical satellite data. The NFI field data were assigned to data sets of three different sample sizes to evaluate the effect of sample size on the accuracy of k-NN estimates. In small-area estimation, calibration techniques, in which samples surveyed outside a county of interest are employed to produce estimates for the county, are often adopted due to the lack of sample observations for the county of interest. Thus, the k-NN estimates, forest growing stock volume and areal proportions by forest types, were compared with estimates obtained from field data with and without calibration. The results indicated that the accuracy of k-NN estimates could be improved as sample size increased. Also, the k-NN technique provided acceptable estimates for small-area estimation. Although there was no significant difference with the calibration approach (p > 0.18), k-NN has potential for small-area estimation and is useful to generate thematic maps of forest attributes.