Short answer
- By the United Nations' newest measure (World Urbanization Prospects 2025, released November 18, 2025), the most populated city in the world is Jakarta, Indonesia, with 41.9 million people, followed by Dhaka (36.6 million) and Tokyo (33.4 million).
- By the older UN urban agglomeration series, and by Demographia's built-up urban area measure, Tokyo is still first: Demographia put Tokyo-Yokohama at 37,785,000 people in its 2023 edition.
- By the city proper measure, the legal boundary only, the largest is Chongqing, China, with 32,054,159 people in the 2020 census, but its boundary encloses a province-sized territory of farms and mountains, which is why demographers treat the figure with caution.
- The same place can legitimately be reported at wildly different sizes. Tokyo is 9.7 million (its 23 special wards, 2020), about 14.25 million (Tokyo Metropolis), 33.4 million (the UN's 2025 city definition), or about 37.8 million (Demographia's built-up area).
- The UN projects that by 2050 Dhaka will be the largest city in the world at about 52.1 million, with Jakarta second and Tokyo down to seventh.
Ask which city has the most people and you will get three confident answers: Tokyo, Jakarta, and, from some lists, Chongqing. All three can be defended, because the argument is not really about people. It is about lines on a map. A city can be counted inside its legal boundary, across its continuous built-up area, or across the whole region that commutes into it, and each choice produces a different winner. In November 2025 the United Nations published a new ranking built on a new measuring method and put Jakarta first, ending a run at the top for Tokyo that had lasted decades in the UN’s older series. Demographia, which measures the physical footprint of cities, still puts Tokyo first. This article explains the three definitions, gives the current rankings on each one, and shows why the numbers move around so much.
Three Ways to Draw a City
Every ranking of the world’s largest cities is built on one of three definitions. Demographia, the research firm that publishes the best-known urban area tables, sets them out plainly, and the confusion between them explains nearly every disagreement in this field.
City proper. The city proper is the political jurisdiction: the territory governed by a single local authority. It is a legal line, not a physical one, and there are no neutral demographic standards for where it falls. Some city propers are tight cores that exclude most of the people who think of themselves as living in the city. Others, especially in China, are enormous administrative regions that include rural counties. A city proper count tells you how many people a particular government administers, which may be far more, or far fewer, than the population of the actual urban place.
Urban area. The urban area is the physical city: the full extent of continuous built-up development, stopping where the buildings stop and rural land begins. It ignores administrative boundaries entirely. This is the measure Demographia uses, identifying the built-up footprint from satellite imagery and census data. It is the closest thing to “the city you would see from an airplane at night.”
Metropolitan area. The metropolitan area is the economic city: the urban area plus the surrounding territory tied to it by commuting. It is the largest of the three measures and the hardest to compare internationally, because countries define commuting zones differently, and some do not define them at all.
The United Nations historically published a fourth, hybrid concept, the urban agglomeration: the population within a contiguous territory inhabited at urban density, without regard to administrative boundaries. In practice, the UN’s older lists mixed agglomerations, metropolitan areas, and cities proper, depending on what each country reported, which is one reason the UN rebuilt its method for the 2025 edition.
Tokyo shows all the layers at once. The historic core, the 23 special wards, held 9,733,276 people in Japan’s 2020 census, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Tokyo Metropolis, the prefecture-level government, counted 14,254,039 people in May 2025. The continuous built-up area that Demographia calls Tokyo-Yokohama adds the port city of Yokohama, itself home to about 3.7 million people, and the suburbs of three more prefectures. Same city, four numbers, each correct for its own definition.
The UN’s New Answer: Jakarta
On November 18, 2025, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs released World Urbanization Prospects 2025, and its headline finding was a changing of the guard. Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is now the world’s most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is second, and Tokyo third with 33 million. Cairo is the only non-Asian city in the top ten.
What changed was not only the cities but the ruler. For the first time, the UN applied the Degree of Urbanisation, a harmonized geospatial method, to every country in the same way. A “city” is now a contiguous cluster of one-kilometer grid cells with a density of at least 1,500 inhabitants per square kilometer and a total population of at least 50,000. The minimum threshold for inclusion fell from 300,000 to 50,000 people, which expanded the analysis to more than 12,000 cities. Because the same density rule is applied everywhere, sprawling, densely settled regions such as Jakarta’s, which older national-definition-based lists had understated, moved sharply up the table. Jakarta rose from 33rd place in the previous ranking to first. Dhaka jumped from ninth to second. Recalculated under the new criteria, Tokyo was the world’s largest city until about 2010, when Jakarta passed it.
The wider findings frame the reshuffle. Cities are now home to 45 percent of the world’s 8.2 billion people, up from 20 percent in 1950. The number of megacities, places with 10 million or more inhabitants, has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025, and 19 of the 33 are in Asia. Small and medium-sized cities still house more people in total than the megacities, and they are growing faster.
The Top 10 Cities in the World, UN World Urbanization Prospects 2025 (population in 2025)
| Rank | City | Country | Population (millions) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jakarta | Indonesia | 41.9 |
| 2 | Dhaka | Bangladesh | 36.6 |
| 3 | Tokyo | Japan | 33.4 |
| 4 | New Delhi | India | 30.2 |
| 5 | Shanghai | China | 29.6 |
| 6 | Guangzhou | China | 27.6 |
| 7 | Cairo | Egypt | 25.6 |
| 8 | Manila | Philippines | 24.7 |
| 9 | Kolkata | India | 22.5 |
| 10 | Seoul | South Korea | 22.5 |
One list, one method, one year. That consistency is the table’s strength, and it is worth holding onto when the next section produces a different answer: the rankings disagree because the methods differ, not because one of them is simply wrong.
The Ranking Most People Know: Tokyo
For most of the past quarter century, the standard answer to this question was Tokyo, and a great deal of what is published online still reflects that era. In the UN’s 2018 revision of World Urbanization Prospects, Tokyo was the world’s largest city with an agglomeration of 37 million inhabitants, followed by New Delhi with 29 million and Shanghai with 26 million; Mexico City and São Paulo had about 22 million each, and Cairo, Mumbai, Beijing, and Dhaka were all close to 20 million. The 2018 report projected that Delhi would pass Tokyo around 2028, reaching about 37.2 million against Tokyo’s 36.8 million. That handover never appeared in the official series, because the 2025 revision changed the measuring method and redrew the whole table before 2028 arrived. It is a useful lesson in how projections work: they extend a method as well as a trend, and when the method changes, the future changes with it.
Tokyo also still leads on the physical measure. In Demographia’s World Urban Areas 2023, the ranking of the largest built-up urban areas in the world reads:
| Rank | Urban area | Population |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tokyo-Yokohama, Japan | 37,785,000 |
| 2 | Jakarta, Indonesia | 35,386,000 |
| 3 | Delhi, India | 31,190,000 |
| 4 | Guangzhou-Foshan, China | 27,119,000 |
| 5 | Mumbai, India | 25,189,000 |
| 6 | Manila, Philippines | 24,156,000 |
| 7 | Shanghai, China | 24,042,000 |
| 8 | Seoul-Incheon, South Korea | 23,225,000 |
| 9 | Cairo, Egypt | 22,679,000 |
| 10 | Mexico City, Mexico | 21,905,000 |
Why does the built-up measure keep Tokyo first while the UN’s new grid method puts it third? Because the two methods draw different shapes. Demographia traces the entire continuous footprint, which for Tokyo-Yokohama is one of the largest urban land areas on Earth, about 8,775 square kilometers, gathering in millions of suburban residents at moderate densities. The UN’s 2025 grid method requires high density cell by cell, which rewards the intensely dense settlement of Jakarta and Dhaka and trims lower-density suburban territory. Neither is a trick. They are answers to two different questions: “where does the built-up city end?” and “where do people live at city density?”
The City Proper Trap: Chongqing
The third answer found on the internet, Chongqing, is the cautionary tale. According to China’s 2020 national census, the municipality of Chongqing had a population of 32,054,159, which makes it the most populous city proper in the world on paper, ahead of Shanghai. The catch is the boundary. Chongqing is a province-level municipality covering about 82,400 square kilometers, an area roughly the size of Austria, most of it mountains, farmland, and separate towns. As of 2021 an estimated 29.6 percent of its residents were rural, and even in 2024 its urban population was about 23.01 million, well below the headline total. On Demographia’s built-up measure, the actual continuous urban area of Chongqing holds only about 8 million people, a quarter of the census headline.
Shanghai’s figures mislead in the opposite direction when they are quoted carelessly. Shanghai is China’s largest urban economy and its built-up area held about 24 million people in Demographia’s 2023 table, but its administrative population is routinely quoted as if it were directly comparable to the ward population of Tokyo or the five boroughs of New York. It is not. City proper figures measure the accident of where each country draws its municipal lines, and any ranking built on them alone ranks boundary-drawing habits as much as cities.
Why the Counts Differ
Four factors move a city up or down these tables, and a careful reader should check each one before trusting any “biggest city” claim.
- The boundary. As the sections above show, this is the largest factor by far. Legal, built-up, and commuting boundaries for the same city can differ by a factor of three or more.
- The method vintage. Rankings from the UN’s 2018 revision and its 2025 revision are not two readings of one series. The 2025 edition changed the definition of a city itself, so a city’s rise or fall between the two editions mostly reflects the new ruler, not growth or decline on the ground.
- The year. Some figures are census counts, others are estimates projected forward from censuses that may be a decade old. A 2020 census figure and a 2025 estimate for the same city are not directly comparable, and a city with a recent census can appear to jump simply because its count was updated.
- What counts as a resident. Countries differ in whether they count registered residents, usual residents, or everyone physically present, and fast-growing cities with large migrant populations are the most sensitive to the choice. Dhaka’s rise in the rankings is partly a story of rural migrants, many displaced by flooding and rising seas, being captured by a density-based method that counts people where they actually live.
What Happens Next
The UN’s projections to 2050, which like all projections extend current methods and trends and should be read as such, point to a further reshuffle. Dhaka is projected to become the world’s largest city by mid-century at about 52.1 million people, narrowly ahead of Jakarta at about 51.8 million. Shanghai is projected third at about 34.9 million, New Delhi fourth at about 33.9 million, and Karachi fifth at about 32.6 million, with Cairo sixth at about 32.4 million. Tokyo, its wider region shrinking along with Japan’s population, is projected to fall to seventh at about 30.7 million. The number of megacities is expected to rise from 33 to 37, with Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Hajipur in India, and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia projected to pass 10 million. Two-thirds of all global population growth to 2050 is projected to occur in cities.
The safest summary is also the honest one. On the newest official measure, the most populated city in the world is Jakarta. On the physical footprint measure, it is still Tokyo. The title will likely change hands again, and when it does, the first thing to ask about the new champion is not how fast it grew, but how it was measured.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most populated city in the world?
By the United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects 2025, released on November 18, 2025, it is Jakarta, Indonesia, with 41.9 million people under the UN’s new grid-based definition of a city. By Demographia’s built-up urban area measure, Tokyo-Yokohama is still first, at about 37.8 million in the 2023 edition. The difference is the definition, and any answer that does not name its definition is incomplete.
Is Tokyo still the biggest city in the world?
It depends on the measure. Tokyo ranks third in the UN’s 2025 ranking at 33.4 million, behind Jakarta and Dhaka, but first in Demographia’s built-up urban area ranking as Tokyo-Yokohama. Under the UN’s recalculated series, Tokyo was the world’s largest city until about 2010. Its core is still growing: Tokyo Metropolis passed 14.25 million people in 2025, even as the wider region slowly shrinks.
Why do some lists say Chongqing is the largest city?
Because Chongqing’s municipal boundary, drawn at province level in China, contained 32,054,159 people in the 2020 census, the largest city proper figure in the world. The boundary covers about 82,400 square kilometers, roughly the size of Austria, including extensive rural areas. Its continuous built-up urban area holds only about 8 million people, so demographers do not treat it as the world’s largest urban place.
What is the difference between a city proper, an urban area, and a metropolitan area?
The city proper is the legal jurisdiction of a single local government. The urban area is the continuous built-up footprint, regardless of boundaries. The metropolitan area is the urban area plus the surrounding commuting zone. For Tokyo those three ideas produce figures of roughly 9.7 million (the 23 special wards), about 37.8 million (the built-up area), and larger still for the widest commuting definitions.
Which city will be the largest in 2050?
The UN projects Dhaka, Bangladesh, at about 52.1 million in 2050, just ahead of Jakarta at about 51.8 million. These are projections from the World Urbanization Prospects 2025 model, not measurements, and the 2025 revision itself showed how a change of method can reorder the table.
How many megacities are there?
The UN counts 33 megacities, cities of 10 million or more people, in 2025, up from 8 in 1975. Nineteen are in Asia. The count is projected to reach 37 by 2050.
Sources & references
- United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), press release, "Cities are home to 45 per cent of the global population, with megacities continuing to grow, UN report finds," November 18, 2025 (un.org): Jakarta the world's most populous city with nearly 42 million residents, Dhaka second, Tokyo third with 33 million; 45 percent of 8.2 billion people living in cities; 33 megacities in 2025, 19 in Asia; megacities to reach 37 by 2050.
- United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects 2025: Summary of Results (population.un.org), with the full top 10 table as reproduced from the report's data (Jakarta 41.9 million, Dhaka 36.6, Tokyo 33.4, New Delhi 30.2, Shanghai 29.6, Guangzhou 27.6, Cairo 25.6, Manila 24.7, Kolkata 22.5, Seoul 22.5) and the 2050 projections (Dhaka 52.1 million, Jakarta 51.8, Shanghai 34.9, New Delhi 33.9, Karachi 32.6, Cairo 32.4, Tokyo 30.7); Degree of Urbanisation method, grid cells of at least 1,500 inhabitants per square kilometer, city threshold lowered from 300,000 to 50,000, more than 12,000 cities analyzed; Tokyo the largest city until about 2010 under the recalculated criteria, as reported from the release by the Associated Press.
- Demographia, World Urban Areas, 2023 edition (demographia.com), Schedule 2, "Largest Built-Up Urban Areas in the World": Tokyo-Yokohama 37,785,000; Jakarta 35,386,000; Delhi 31,190,000; Guangzhou-Foshan 27,119,000; Mumbai 25,189,000; Manila 24,156,000; Shanghai 24,042,000; Seoul-Incheon 23,225,000; Cairo 22,679,000; Mexico City 21,905,000; Chongqing built-up urban area about 7,990,000. Definitions of city proper, urban area, and metropolitan area as set out by Demographia's Wendell Cox in New Geography, "A Comparison of the World's 1,000 Largest Urban Areas."
- UN DESA, 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, as released May 16, 2018 (reported by UN DESA and press coverage): Tokyo the largest city with an agglomeration of 37 million, New Delhi 29 million, Shanghai 26 million, Mexico City and São Paulo about 22 million each, Cairo, Mumbai, Beijing, and Dhaka close to 20 million; Delhi projected to become the most populous city around 2028 at about 37.2 million against Tokyo's 36.8 million.
- China's Seventh National Population Census (2020), Chongqing figures as compiled in reference sources: municipal population 32,054,159; urban share 70.4 percent in 2021 (29.6 percent rural); urban population 23.01 million in 2024; municipal area about 82,400 square kilometers.
- Tokyo Metropolitan Government figures via Statistics Bureau of Japan data as compiled in reference sources: Tokyo Metropolis population 14,254,039 (May 2025 estimate). Encyclopaedia Britannica (britannica.com), "Tokyo": the 23 special wards population of 9,733,276 in the 2020 census; Greater Tokyo described as the largest urban and industrial agglomeration in Japan; Yokohama population about 3.7 million as reported in coverage of the UN release.
