World Urbanization Prospects 2025
The share of each country’s population living in cities, in towns and semi-dense areas, and in rural areas, from 1950 to 2050.
- Publisher
- United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division
- Release
- 2025
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0 IGO
- Origin
- population.un.org/wup
- Retrieved
- 26 October 2026
- How to cite
- United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2025). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2025 Revision, Online Edition.
- Coverage
- 237 of 237 countries and areas, with values from 1950 to 2050.
Indicators and units
| Indicator | Unit | Refers to |
|---|---|---|
| Living in cities | percent | 1 July |
| Living in towns and semi-dense areas | percent | 1 July |
| Living in rural areas | percent | 1 July |
How we process it
- File 2 of the 2025 revision read: the percentage of the population by degree of urbanisation at mid-year, for every country and area.
- Countries matched to the site’s countries and areas by the UN location code. The three shares are checked to add up to 100 % in every year.
- Years from 2026 on are UN projections and are labelled as such.
Known limitations
- The degree of urbanisation uses one rule for every country: a city has at least 50,000 people at a density of at least 1,500 per km². National definitions of “urban” differ, so national statistics can show other shares.
- The estimates for the past are derived from population grids built from satellite data and censuses, not from counts of each place.
Downloaded files
| File | SHA-256 |
|---|---|
| F02.xlsx | 3b262c6dcad2cc0ac5eef3e42c036207184de72926207e7d39640f7d45c4cedc |