How Many Cities Over 1 Million People Does Each Country Have?

This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Have you ever wondered how many cities with more than a million people each country actually has?

Reddit user Joergen-the-second created a fascinating world map that answers this question. It visualizes the number of urban centers with over 1 million residents in each country, based on publicly available population data.

At first glance, the ranking of countries might not surprise you too much—China leads, India follows, and large countries like Brazil, the U.S., and Russia make the list. But when you look at the ratio between the national population and the number of these large cities, some unexpected things pop up.

Let’s take a look at the top 12 countries and put their overall populations side by side to make comparisons easier:

Rank	Country	Cities with 1M+ People	Population (approx.)
1	China	92	1.4 billion
2	India	46	1.4 billion
3	Brazil	17	216 million
4	Russia	16	143 million
5	Indonesia	14	277 million
6	Turkey	13	85 million
7	Japan	12	125 million
8	United States	10	340 million
9	Mexico	10	129 million
10	Pakistan	9	241 million
11	South Korea	9	52 million
12	Iran	8	89 million

Population Size ≠ Number of Large Cities

This map makes an important point: a larger population doesn’t automatically mean more large cities. India and China have huge populations—and correspondingly, many million-plus cities. That pattern makes intuitive sense.

But not all large countries follow it.

Take Russia, for example: with 143 million people, it has more cities over a million than the United States, which has more than twice the population. That might seem surprising, but it’s a legacy of the Soviet period, when urban planning emphasized distributing population and industry across many mid-sized cities rather than concentrating growth in just a few mega-urban centers.

On the other hand, countries like South Korea and Japan cluster much of their population into just a few major urban areas. High-speed transit and compact geography make this kind of urban concentration more feasible.

Meanwhile, Turkey and Iran—each with under 100 million residents—manage to support a relatively high number of million-person cities, thanks to the way their urban networks evolved regionally rather than centrally.