All the Cities in the World Larger Than New York City

Are they all shitholes?

All the Cities in the World Larger Than New York City

November 4, 2024, Visual Capitalist

By Pallavi Rao

This chart ranks the world’s largest urban agglomerations that are more populous than New York City. An urban agglomeration measures the total population living in a continuous urban area, regardless of local administrative boundaries.

The data for this graphic is sourced from the UN’s World Urbanisation Prospects using 2025 estimates. Figures are rounded.

There are nine cities in the world larger than NYC, though the Big Apple is still, by far, the wealthiest.

Tokyo leads the list, currently home to 37 million people, about the same number of people in all of Canada.

Interestingly, Tokyo took NYC’s crown in 1954 and has since held on to it despite other rapidly expanding metropolises creeping ever closer.

For example, Delhi, ranked second with nearly 35 million people, is projected to overtake Tokyo by 2028. Another Indian city Mumbai (22 million) is also larger than New York.

Mirroring India, China’s capital, Beijing (23 million), and financial capital, Shanghai, (31 million) both beat NYC as well.

In fact, New York isn’t even North America’s largest city—that distinction belongs to Mexico City, home to 23 million people.

The Big Apple’s listed population, 19.2 million people, might seem incorrect to Americans who live there, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. It all depends on what definition of city is considered: the administrative area or the entire urban area?

For example, the population of just the five boroughs (the official city limits) is 8.3 million.

The extra 10 million people are accounted for when looking at the official name of the urban agglomeration: New York–Newark, NY–NJ–CT–PA Combined Statistical Area.