Share of population living in urban areas

Share of population living in urban areasUN national definitions

Description: Share of the population living in urban areas, based on each country's national definition.
Data source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Unit: %
Date range: 1950-2025
Last updated: 2026-02-17
Next expected update: 2027-02-17
Managed by: Lucas Rodés-Guirao

Countries classify areas as urban or rural using their own criteria, such as administrative boundaries, population size or density, economic activity, or some combination of these. As a result, similar settlements can be classified differently across countries.
Definitions can also change within a country over time, creating breaks in the series that reflect reclassification rather than real changes in where people live. For cross-country comparisons that avoid these issues, we also publish indicators based on the Degree of Urbanization (DEGURBA), a harmonized framework that classifies settlements by population density and size using consistent criteria across countries. You can find these indicators here.

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Frequently asked questions

How did Our World in Data process this data?

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

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Data sources

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division – World Urbanization Prospects 2025 – Percentage Urban and Rural by National Definition

Percentage of population living in urban and rural areas based on national definitions of urban areas. The dataset provides the share of total population living in urban and rural areas by region, subregion, country and area from 1950 to 2050.

National definitions of "urban" vary considerably from country to country. Criteria such as population size, population density, type of economic activity, physical characteristics, level of infrastructure, or a combination of these may be used to define urban areas.

Retrieved on

February 17, 2025

Retrieved from

https://population.un.org/wup/

Citation

This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data.

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2025). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2025 Revision, Online Edition. POP/DB/WUP/Rev.2025/F15

How to cite

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of population living in urban areas”, part of the following publication: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Veronika Samborska, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser (2024) - “Urbanization”. Data adapted from United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261102-112946/grapher/share-of-population-urban.html [online resource] (archived on November 2, 2026).

How to cite this data

If you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of population living in urban areas – UN national definitions” [dataset]. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “World Urbanization Prospects 2025 – Percentage Urban and Rural by National Definition” [original data]. Retrieved November 2, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261102-112946/grapher/share-of-population-urban.html (archived on November 2, 2026).

All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately. This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.

All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

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