Last updated: October 2026
The world's largest cities, region by region — from the UN figures the Bureau's city pages already cite.
More than eight billion people live on Earth, and most of them live in cities. This page ranks the world’s largest metropolitan agglomerations by region, using the figures the Bureau’s city pages cite from the United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects, 2022 Revision. Each figure is a metropolitan agglomeration estimate — the whole urban area, not the administrative city limits.
Read the table with one caution: the Bureau’s city pages publish city populations, not regional population totals. This page therefore ranks agglomerations within each region rather than inventing regional totals the Bureau has never published. Where a region’s largest city sits on a continental boundary, the note says so.
| Region | Largest metropolitan agglomerations (UN World Urbanization Prospects, 2022 Revision) | Population (millions) |
|---|---|---|
| Asia | Tokyo, Japan | 37.2 |
| New Delhi, India | 32.9 | |
| Shanghai, China | 29.2 | |
| Dhaka, Bangladesh | 23.2 | |
| Beijing, China | 21.8 | |
| Africa | Cairo, Egypt | 22.2 |
| Kinshasa, DR Congo | 16.3 | |
| Lagos, Nigeria | 15.9 | |
| Johannesburg, South Africa | 10.3 | |
| Luanda, Angola | 9.3 | |
| Latin America & the Caribbean | São Paulo, Brazil | 22.6 |
| Mexico City, Mexico | 22.3 | |
| Buenos Aires, Argentina | 15.5 | |
| Rio de Janeiro, Brazil | 13.7 | |
| Bogotá, Colombia | 11.5 | |
| Northern America | New York–Newark, United States | 18.9 |
| Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana, United States | 12.5 | |
| Chicago, United States | 8.9 | |
| Houston, United States | 6.7 | |
| Toronto, Canada | 6.4 | |
| Europe | Moscow, Russia | 12.7 |
| Paris, France | 11.2 | |
| London, United Kingdom | 9.6 | |
| Oceania | Melbourne, Australia | 5.2 |
| Sydney, Australia | 5.1 | |
| Brisbane, Australia | 2.5 | |
| Perth, Australia | 2.1 | |
| Auckland, New Zealand | 1.7 |
Boundary note: Istanbul (15.8 million) is transcontinental; the UN groups Türkiye in Western Asia, so it is not listed under Europe here. The Bureau’s city pages give the same UN figure for Istanbul.
Every figure in this table is copied from the Bureau’s city pages, each of which cites the UN World Urbanization Prospects, 2022 Revision (metropolitan agglomeration estimate). The Bureau notes on those pages that it cross-checked major-city figures against UN WUP, and that smaller-city figures are presented as published and have not been individually re-verified. Agglomeration figures describe the continuous urban area and are larger than city-proper populations. This page does not publish regional population totals, because the Bureau’s city pages do not contain them; regional totals would require a different UN dataset. Figures are rounded to one decimal place as published.
