Global Urbanization: UN World Urbanization Prospects 2025 Data

The UN DESA Population Division published the 2025 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects in November 2025 [4]. It has estimates from 1950 and projections to 2050 for 237 countries and areas, and covers more than 12,000 urban settlements with at least 50,000 inhabitants [2]. The revision is consistent with the World Population Prospects 2024 [1].

In 2025, cities are home to 45% of the global population of 8.2 billion. This is more than double the share in 1950 [1].

The 2025 revision uses the Degree of Urbanisation method, which classifies settlements as cities, towns or rural areas in the same way in every country [4]. Under this method, the share of people living in cities rose from 20% to 45% between 1950 and 2025. Including dense towns, the share rose from 43% to 58% [2]. Aggregating national definitions of urban areas also gives 58% for 2025 [2].

The UN reports that 45% of people lived in cities and 36% in towns in 2025, against 20% and 40% in 1950 [4]. The remaining 19% lived in rural areas in 2025 (FREEE.REPORT calculation).

The population of cities was about 1.27 billion in 1975, 2.43 billion in 2000 and 3.69 billion in 2025. It is projected to reach 4.67 billion by 2050 [3]. The share of the world population living in cities rose from 31.1% in 1975 to 39.4% in 2000 and 44.8% in 2025. It is projected to reach 48.3% in 2050 [3]. The UN projects that cities will account for two-thirds of global population growth to 2050 [3].

The previous 2018 revision used national definitions. It projected that 68% of the world population would live in urban areas by 2050 [5]. Because the two revisions measure urbanization differently, their figures are not directly comparable.

The number of cities with 10 million or more inhabitants quadrupled, from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025. More than half of the new megacities are in Asia [4]. Under the new method, Jakarta is the world's most populous city, with nearly 42 million people [4].

Most cities are small. In 2025, 96% of the world's cities had fewer than 1 million inhabitants. There were 1,822 small cities with 250,000 to 1 million people [2].

Our sources are UN DESA's World Urbanization Prospects 2025 page [1], the Summary of Results [2] and the World's Cities in 2025 data booklet [3]. We also use an EU Space programme summary of the report for the megacity counts and the 1950 city and town shares [4], and the UN DESA announcement of the 2018 revision [5]. The 2025 revision applies the Degree of Urbanisation method, which is based on data from the Joint Research Centre's Global Human Settlement Layer [4]. City population figures are converted from thousands to billions and rounded to two decimals. FREEE.REPORT calculation: the 2025 rural share (19%) is 100% minus the city share (45%) and the town share (36%). Values for 2050 are UN projections.