US Map / Cities

US Cities Map

The hundred largest cities in the United States, ranked by the Census Bureau's 2024 estimates — just under 66 million people between them, in 33 states and one federal district.

What a city-limits population actually counts

Every number on this page is the population inside a municipal boundary, and municipal boundaries are drawn by history rather than by geography. Phoenix covers roughly 500 square miles and has absorbed most of the suburban growth around it; Boston covers under 50, and Cambridge, Somerville, Newton and Quincy next door have stayed separate cities for two centuries. The two metropolitan areas are of broadly similar size, yet Phoenix sits at No. 5 on this list and Boston at No. 26. The same effect explains why Jacksonville, which absorbed its whole county, outranks Miami, and why Oklahoma City and Kansas City appear so high. Read the ranking as a list of city governments, not of urban areas.

Cities that are also counties

Six entries on the list are consolidated city-counties, where one government took over the whole county and the census figure follows: Jacksonville (Duval County, merged in 1968), Indianapolis (Marion County, 1970), Louisville (Jefferson County, 2003), Nashville (Davidson County, 1963), Lexington (Fayette County, 1974) and Anchorage, whose unified municipality covers more ground than Rhode Island. None of them has a downtown anywhere near the size its rank implies; what they have is a boundary that swallowed the suburbs whole. Three older cities arrived at the same arrangement long before — Philadelphia in 1854, San Francisco in 1856 and Denver in 1902 each occupy exactly one county — and the five boroughs of New York are five separate counties. The county maps section shows how each state divides.

Honolulu is not an incorporated city

Hawaii has no incorporated municipalities at all. Its only local governments are four counties, and the City and County of Honolulu covers the whole island of Oahu, well over half the state's population. What appears on this list as Honolulu is therefore a census-designated place — a statistical outline the Census Bureau draws around the built-up area so that it can be counted like a city. Washington is the other special case: it belongs to no state, has no county government, and its boundary is the federal district itself.

Which states hold the most of the hundred

California has 15; Texas has 14; Florida has 8; Arizona has 7. Between them those four states account for well over a third of the list. Cities from 33 states and the District of Columbia appear in all, which leaves 17 states with no entry whatsoever — including every state in northern New England, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, West Virginia and Mississippi. Population alone does not decide it: Massachusetts and Michigan are populous states with one city each on the list, because their people live in many small municipalities rather than a few large ones. The state maps section gives each state's own picture, and the regions section explains how the Census Bureau groups them.

Northeast

Seven of the hundred largest cities are in the Northeast: five in a row on the Boston-to-Philadelphia seaboard, plus Buffalo on Lake Erie and Pittsburgh on the Ohio.

Midwest

The Midwest's entries are strung along the Great Lakes and the big rivers, with the plains states contributing only a handful.

South

The South supplies more of the list than any other region, most of it from Texas, Florida and the Carolina and Virginia Piedmont.

West

Western cities annexed as they grew, so the region's share of the list is far larger than its share of the country's population.

Where to go next

Each city page here is text and tables rather than a map widget, so it loads at once: the county or counties it sits in, its rank, its time zone and the cities around it. For the picture on a map instead, open the US map with cities, which plots the largest of them against state borders. From any city page you can follow the state link into the state maps, the county link into the county maps, or the region link into the four regions and nine divisions.