ATLAS · MEGA-CITIES
Every Mega-City on Earth
The world’s giant cities on one map: 53 urban areas of five million people or more, across 32 countries, each coloured and sized by how many people live there— from the radar-green cities just over the five-million mark up to the singular severe-red supergiant at the top of the scale. 19 of them pass ten million. The largest of all is Tokyo, in Japan, whose agglomeration Natural Earth estimates at around 35,676,000 people. Data is from Natural Earth (public domain), a snapshot taken 2026-06-24.
What the colours mean
Each city is tinted — and sized — by its population. Because every city here already passes five million, the ramp is stretched across the giants so they stay tellable apart: most cluster in the five-to-ten-million range, a smaller group passes ten and then fifteen million, and a single city stands alone above twenty. A cluster always takes the colour of its largest member, so one supergiant will set a whole region of the map glowing red.
What actually counts as a mega-city — why the figures here measure the whole urban area rather than the city proper, and why the world keeps growing more of them — is worth a couple of minutes:
What makes a mega-city, explained →The biggest cities
The largest urban areas on Earth — sprawling agglomerations home to tens of millions. Open a country to see its mega-city (or mega-cities) and how they compare.
Every country with a mega-city
Angola · Argentina · Bangladesh · Brazil · Canada · Chile · China · Colombia · Democratic Republic of the Congo · Egypt · France · Hong Kong · India · Indonesia · Iran · Iraq · Japan · Mexico · Nigeria · Pakistan · Peru · Philippines · Russia · Singapore · South Korea · Spain · Taiwan · Thailand · Turkey · United Kingdom · United States · Vietnam
About this data
Cities, their locations and their populations come from Natural Earth, the open, public-domain mapping dataset that also supplies this atlas’s country shapes. We map every populated place whose population — measured as the wider urban agglomeration, not just the official city limits — reaches five million or more, and colour and size it by that figure. Because these are agglomeration estimates rather than a single year’s census, a city can look larger here than its “city proper” population elsewhere on this atlas: greater Tokyo, for instance, is counted as one continuous built-up area of tens of millions. The figures are a consistent, sourced snapshot rather than a live count, and a few large urban areas straddle administrative or even national lines; we show them as Natural Earth records them. This is a map of where the world’s great cities are, not a ranking, and we refresh the snapshot periodically rather than calling the source on every visit.