The electrical characteristics of Au/3C-SiC Schottky diodes were studied as a function of contact area. While the larger diodes were characterized by conventional current-voltage measurements, conductive atomic force microscopy was used to perform current-voltage measurements on diodes of contact radius down to 5 μm. The results show that the Schottky barrier height increases upon reducing the contact area, and for the smallest diodes the value approaches the ideal barrier height of the system. The results were correlated with defects in the 3C-SiC and an analytical expression was derived to describe the dependence of the barrier height on the defect density.