Whether you are building a city picker, seeding a map, or settling a pub argument about which city is biggest, this reference ranks the world’s largest cities by metropolitan population. Each row shows the country, an approximate population, and the city-centre coordinates.
How it works
Cities are ranked by metropolitan (urban agglomeration) population — the continuous built-up area, which is far larger than the legal city limits. The list is sorted by rank, and you can filter it by city or country name. Each entry includes:
- Rank — global position by metro population.
- Population — rounded agglomeration estimate.
- Coordinates — latitude and longitude of the city centre, useful for mapping and distance maths.
Why metro population — and why it differs so much from city population
Most people are surprised to discover that a city they think of as “huge” has a far smaller official population than they expected, while another that seems modest in size appears in the top ten. This discrepancy comes from how city boundaries are drawn.
City-proper population counts only the people inside the legal administrative boundary. In some cities this boundary tightly wraps the urban core; in others it encompasses vast sparsely-populated territory. Shanghai’s administrative area, for example, is enormous by design; London’s “City of London” is famously tiny (roughly one square mile with fewer than 10,000 residents).
Metropolitan or urban agglomeration population counts everyone in the continuously built-up urban area regardless of which municipality or district they formally belong to. This is the measure that best reflects how many people functionally live in and around a major city — using its transport, hospitals, and economy.
As a result, comparisons between metro populations of different cities are more meaningful than comparisons of city-proper populations, and this reference uses metro-area estimates.
Geographic spread and what the data shows
The list reflects the ongoing global shift in urban population toward Asia. The largest metropolitan areas by population are concentrated in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. By metropolitan population:
- Tokyo (Japan) is consistently ranked first, with a greater Tokyo area population that dwarfs any city in Europe or the Americas.
- Delhi (India) and Shanghai (China) follow, both having grown dramatically over recent decades.
- Among the Americas, São Paulo (Brazil) and Mexico City (Mexico) rank as the largest metropolitan areas. No US city reaches the top five by metro population.
- European cities appear much further down the list than their cultural prominence might suggest — European urbanisation peaked earlier and at a smaller scale.
Using the coordinates
Each city has a latitude and longitude for its approximate centre. These coordinates are useful for:
- Seeding a map — drop pins on a world map or render a choropleth.
- Distance calculations — combine with a haversine formula to compute great-circle distances between any two cities.
- Geolocation testing — populate a test database with real-world coordinates across a global distribution.
- App demos — a city picker backed by real coordinates is more convincing than invented data.
The haversine formula for great-circle distance between two points (lat1, lon1) and (lat2, lon2) in kilometres is:
a = sin²(Δlat/2) + cos(lat1) × cos(lat2) × sin²(Δlon/2)
d = 2 × R × arcsin(√a) where R ≈ 6371 kmPopulation figures vary between sources because every body defines city boundaries and counts at different times. The estimates here are rounded for ranking and comparison, not official statistics. For precise work, cross-check against the latest national census or the UN World Urbanization Prospects dataset.