200 Largest Cities in the World

How to use 200 Largest Cities

The table works three ways. Scroll it to browse the world by size. Search it to jump straight to a city — type a few letters and the row appears with the time already ticking. Or sort it to compare: by name when you know what you are looking for, by time when you want to see which part of the planet is awake right now. Click a city to open its full page, with sunrise, sunset and date details for that place.

The most common uses are practical rather than curious: Calling someone — check whether it is a polite hour there before you dial. Scheduling a meeting — line up three or four cities and find the overlap where nobody is asleep.

Travel — see what your body clock is about to be asked to do. Deadlines — “end of day” means a different moment in every column of this table.

The largest cities in the world, side by side

Ranking cities by size is famously slippery: a “city” can mean the city proper inside administrative borders or the whole metropolitan area that functions as one place, and the two lists disagree. Tokyo is commonly cited as the world’s largest metropolitan area, with megacities across Asia — Delhi and Shanghai among them — close behind, but the exact order depends on where each source draws the boundary. This page doesn’t referee that argument; it takes the 200 that top the lists and puts them on one screen, because for most visitors the interesting fact about a huge city is not its precise rank but what time its inhabitants think it is.

Somewhere in these 200 rows it is always Monday morning, and somewhere it is still Sunday night. Choose your correspondent accordingly.

Why city time beats country time

Asking for “the time in the USA” or “the time in Russia” has no single answer — large countries span many zones, and daylight saving rules differ even between neighbours. A city pins the answer down: local time in one place, one number, no asterisks. That is why the table is built from cities rather than countries, and why two cities in the same country can show different hours. When a deadline, a broadcast or a flight is announced “local time”, this table tells you what that actually means where you are.

Where the list goes next

The ranking is a hub, not a destination. Each city entry is a doorway: The local clock, for when you need to know whether it is a reasonable hour to call. Coordinates, for anything that needs a position rather than a name.

Distance to any other city on the list, measured along the curve of the Earth. Most people arrive here on the way to something else — planning a call, checking a flight, settling a dispute about whether one city is bigger than another. The ranking is the index; the city pages are the content.