Urban population share
The percentage of people living in areas classified as urban by their national statistical office.
How it is measured
National definitions of "urban" harmonized by the UN World Urbanization Prospects.
Where the number came from
The UN has compiled World Urbanization Prospects since the 1970s, but it has always had to work with whatever each country calls urban, and countries disagree profoundly. Some use a bare population threshold, which may be two hundred people or fifty thousand. Some require a minimum share of non-agricultural employment. Some designate settlements administratively, so a town becomes urban when a ministry says so. The consequence is that the world urbanisation figure is an aggregate of incompatible national definitions, and the UN says so openly. The main attempt to fix this is the Degree of Urbanisation method, endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission in 2020, which classifies one-kilometre grid cells by population density and contiguity so that the same rule applies everywhere. It produces noticeably different answers for some countries, and it is gradually appearing alongside the national figures rather than replacing them.
Worked example: India at 35.7 percent, and why the definition is doing the work
Our 2025 figures put India at about 35.7 percent urban against China at roughly 66.3, Japan near 92.3, Nigeria at about 63.8 and Burundi at roughly 25.7. Read straight, India looks barely more urbanised than Burundi and half as urbanised as Nigeria, which does not match anyone’s experience of the three countries. A large part of the gap is definitional. India’s census requires a settlement to satisfy three conditions at once before it counts as urban: at least 5,000 residents, a density of at least 400 per square kilometre, and at least 75 percent of the male working population employed outside agriculture. That is among the most restrictive tests in the world, and it leaves a great many places that any visitor would call towns classified as villages. Applying a density-and-contiguity rule of the kind the Degree of Urbanisation method uses raises the Indian figure substantially. None of this makes 35.7 percent wrong; it is exactly what the Indian definition produces, and India applies it consistently over time, so the Indian series is excellent for tracking Indian change. It is the cross-country comparison that the definition will not support, which is the general rule for this field: trust it within a country, distrust it between them.
Figures read from our own urban population share table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
World Bank WDI (SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS).
Refresh cadence: Annual; taken on each rebuild.
What to watch for
National urban definitions differ enormously (population thresholds from 200 to 50,000), so cross-country gaps partly reflect definitions rather than reality.
CIA World Factbook equivalent field: "Urbanization" (frozen at the January 2026 final edition; our figures continue from live sources).