2026-11-03 · people
One in eight people live in a megacity
Cities over ten million are few — but enormous.
One in eight people — 12.5% of the world's 8.2 billion — live in a megacity of ten million or more. Such cities are rare on the map, yet they are home to more than a billion people, and how they grow will shape housing, transport, and daily life for decades.
1 cell = 8.2 million people (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells
Context
The 2026 figures draw on the UN's World Urbanization Prospects (2025 Revision), which estimates and projects urban, rural, and major urban agglomeration populations for every country from 1950 to 2050, consistent with World Population Prospects 2024.
A megacity here means an urban agglomeration of ten million or more inhabitants. At 12.5% of humanity, that is just over a billion people — still a minority of the world, but one concentrated in a relative handful of enormous cities.
The UN's urbanization series is used widely across the UN system, by international organizations, researchers, and the media, making the ten-million threshold a standard yardstick for comparing city scale.
UN megacity population threshold 10M+.
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