Largest Cities in the World by Population: 2026 Snapshot Based on UN 2025 Estimates

Overview: how the biggest cities by population are compared

Lists of the most populated cities often disagree because “city” can refer to a municipality, a built-up urban area, an urban agglomeration or a metropolitan labour market. WUP 2025 improves international comparability by applying the Degree of Urbanization framework to population grids instead of relying only on national administrative definitions.

The ranking measures population size only. It does not rank population density, land area, metropolitan GDP, infrastructure quality, liveability, administrative importance or future growth. A city’s position can also change between revisions when the boundary method changes, even without a sudden demographic jump.

Top 10 largest cities in the world

Nine of the ten largest cities are in Asia. Cairo is the only African city in the Top 10, while no European or American city reaches the first ten positions under the UN’s harmonized 2025 definition.

Top 10 cities by official UN population estimate for 1 July 2025

All values are official UN estimates for 1 July 2025. Ranks use the underlying population values before display formatting.

Methodology

The numeric source is the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects 2025. The ranking uses the 2025 column of the official table WUP2025-F18-DEGURBA-100_Largest_Cities and publishes its first 50 entries in descending population order.

Names follow the UN table. A label such as Hajipur refers to the name assigned to a harmonized urban centre; the value should not be interpreted as the population inside the municipality of the same name. The same caution applies whenever an administrative place name is used for a larger connected urban footprint.

Limitations: these are internationally harmonized estimates, not simultaneous censuses or real-time headcounts. Results depend on population-grid quality, spatial resolution and boundary rules. The metric does not measure density, land area, economic output, quality of life, infrastructure capacity or future population change.

World city population table: Top 50

Search by city or country, filter by region, or change the display order to compare the published UN population estimates.

50 cities shown.

Largest cities in the world by official UN 2025 population estimate

Source: UN World Urbanization Prospects 2025, city population estimates for 1 July 2025. Country and broad-region labels support navigation; the rank is determined only by population.

Insights from the Top 50 city population ranking

What this ranking means

This ranking is best read as a comparison of population inside consistently defined dense urban footprints. It is more suitable for global comparison than a list that mixes city-proper populations for some countries with metropolitan populations for others.

Jakarta’s position above Tokyo does not imply a sudden one-year population reversal. WUP 2025 applies a new harmonized geographic framework, so part of the difference from older rankings reflects how connected urban territory is identified and assigned to each city.

An official estimate is still an estimate. It combines national population statistics, gridded data and geospatial methods for a common date. The result is not a real-time headcount, the population governed by one municipality or a measure of how crowded the city feels.

For comparisons of urban agglomerations, metropolitan areas, city proper or population density, use a dataset built specifically for that boundary and metric. Those concepts should not be treated as interchangeable with this UN city population table.

FAQ

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