The 25 Largest US Metro Areas in 2025, and Which Ones Are Still Growing

New York, Los Angeles and Chicago stay on top while two Texas metros close in

The largest metropolitan area in the United States is New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ, with an estimated 20,112,448 residents on July 1, 2025, according to the Vintage 2025 population estimates that the US Census Bureau published on 26 March 2026. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim ranks second with 12,844,441 people and Chicago-Naperville-Elgin third with 9,434,123. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (8,477,157) and Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands (7,904,627) complete the top five, and both are growing much faster than the three metros above them.

The rest of the top ten is tightly bunched. Atlanta (6,482,182), Washington (6,465,724), Miami (6,391,072) and Philadelphia (6,329,118) are separated by only 153,064 people, and Phoenix (5,228,938) is tenth. Together the ten largest metros had 89.7 million residents, 26.2 percent of the national population of 341,784,857. The 25 largest held 143.2 million people, or 41.9 percent of everyone living in the country.

A clear top five: New York alone has more residents than Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth combined (17.9 million).

A metropolitan statistical area, or MSA, is a group of counties built around an urban core of at least 50,000 people, plus outlying counties that are tied to that core by commuting. Because the boundaries follow counties rather than city limits, metro rankings look very different from city rankings, a point covered in detail further down. For the national totals that these metro figures add up to, see our US population statistics from 2015 to 2026.

All 25 largest metro areas: population, one year change and change since 2020

The table lists each metro under the name the Office of Management and Budget assigned in its July 2023 delineations, the states it covers and its population on July 1, 2025. The one year change compares July 2024 with July 2025. The five year change runs from July 1, 2020, the first annual estimate of the decade, to July 1, 2025.

Source: US Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 estimates (March 2026); annual series for 2020 and 2024 as republished by FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Changes and percentages calculated by BusinessStats. The Chicago change since 2020 rounds to 0.0 percent.

Six of the 25 metros grew by more than 9 percent in five years: Austin (13.9 percent), Dallas-Fort Worth (10.6 percent), Orlando and Houston (10.3 percent each), Charlotte (10.1 percent) and San Antonio (9.5 percent). Five are smaller than they were in July 2020: Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, St. Louis and Chicago. The Chicago loss is only 1,848 people, and its population has risen in each of the last three years.

Dallas and Houston added 1.5 million people since 2020 while Los Angeles and Chicago stalled

The clearest way to see the shift is to follow four of the five largest metros through the decade so far. Between July 2020 and July 2025, Dallas-Fort Worth gained 809,741 residents and Houston 735,343, together about 1.5 million people. Over the same five years Los Angeles lost 338,236 residents and Chicago 1,848.

Converging lines: the gap between Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth shrank from 1,768,555 people in 2020 to 956,966 in 2025.

The two older metros followed a similar path in the early part of the decade. Los Angeles fell from 13,182,677 in July 2020 to 12,904,776 in July 2022, and Chicago from 9,435,971 to 9,303,151. After that their paths split. Chicago gained residents in 2023, 2024 and 2025 and is now back to within 1,848 people of its 2020 level. Los Angeles added 24,986 people in 2023 to 2024 and then lost 62,454 in 2024 to 2025. Los Angeles County alone lost 53,934 residents in that year, the largest numeric decline of any county in the United States.

Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth grew in every year since 2020, and their combined gain in 2024 to 2025 was 250,277 people. Houston recorded the largest numeric gain of any metro in the country for the year, edging Dallas-Fort Worth by 3,163 people. Texas and California each have four of the 25 largest metros, and Florida has three. For state level economic context, see our data on real GDP growth by US state. Dallas and Houston, like New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta, were also host regions for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, covered in our guide to World Cup host cities.

Houston and Dallas led numeric growth in 2025, while smaller Southern metros led percentage growth

The Census Bureau ranks metros in two ways: by how many people they added and by how fast they grew. Between July 1, 2024 and July 1, 2025, eight of the ten largest numeric gainers were in the South as the Census Bureau defines it, and the other two, Phoenix and Seattle, were in the West. Houston added 126,720 residents, Dallas-Fort Worth 123,557 and Atlanta 61,953. Phoenix (59,065), Charlotte (54,122) and Austin (53,796) followed.

Texas leads: four of the top ten gainers are in Texas, and they added 342,475 people between them.

Percentage growth tells a different story, because a small metro can post a high rate while adding far fewer people. Ocala, Florida grew fastest at 3.4 percent, adding 14,665 residents to reach 442,660. Seven of the ten fastest growing metros are in Florida and the Carolinas, and Raleigh-Cary was the only one with more than 1 million residents, growing 2.4 percent to 1,595,720. The two top ten lists for 2024 to 2025 have no metro in common.

Source: US Census Bureau, press release CB26-56, Table 11 (26 March 2026). Percentages as rounded by the Census Bureau.

Among the 25 largest metros, the fastest growth rate in 2024 to 2025 belonged to Austin (2.1 percent), followed by Charlotte (1.9 percent) and Houston (1.6 percent). The slowest were Los Angeles (minus 0.5 percent), San Diego (minus 0.2 percent) and Miami (minus 0.1 percent), the only three of the 25 that shrank during the year.

Five of the 25 largest metros have fewer residents than in 2020

Over the full five years, the gap between the fastest and slowest of the largest metros is wide. Dallas-Fort Worth gained 809,741 people while Los Angeles lost 338,236. The chart ranks all 25 by the change in residents between July 2020 and July 2025.

Two California metros at the bottom: Los Angeles and San Francisco together lost 454,048 residents in five years.

Los Angeles is the only one of the 25 that lost residents in four of the five years since 2020. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont fell from 4,745,853 in 2020 to 4,595,850 in 2022, then grew slightly in each of the next three years, reaching 4,630,041 in 2025. San Diego is 18,862 people below its 2020 level and lost 5,294 residents in the latest year. St. Louis (minus 5,390) and Chicago (minus 1,848) are close to flat.

Miami is a different case. The metro gained 257,913 people between 2020 and 2025, but it shrank by 8,909 in the latest year. Miami-Dade County lost 10,115 residents, the third largest numeric decline of any county, and Pinellas County in the Tampa metro lost 11,834, the second largest. The Tampa metro as a whole still grew by 13,538 because of gains in other counties.

Slower immigration hit some smaller metros near the southern border hardest. Growth in Laredo, Texas fell from 3.2 percent in 2023 to 2024 to 0.2 percent in 2024 to 2025, in Yuma, Arizona from 3.3 percent to 1.4 percent, and in El Centro, California from 1.2 percent to minus 0.7 percent. In total, 310 of the 387 metro areas grew more slowly in 2024 to 2025 than a year earlier. Data on enforcement at the border is covered in our report on US Border Patrol apprehensions and expulsions.

Immigration, births and moves between regions: the three engines of metro growth

The Census Bureau splits every change in population into three components. Natural change is births minus deaths. Net international migration covers people moving into or out of the United States. Net domestic migration is the balance of people moving between US counties. A small residual remains where the estimates do not fully reconcile.

For all 387 metro areas combined, population rose from 293,746,059 on July 1, 2024 to 295,450,885 on July 1, 2025, a gain of 1,704,826. Net international migration contributed 1,209,432 people, natural increase 613,743, and net domestic migration took away 119,205. In other words, international migration alone was equal to 70.9 percent of the net metro gain, even in a year when it slowed sharply.

Immigration halved: the net international migration rate for metros fell from 8.92 to 4.11 per 1,000, while natural change held at 2.08.

That slowdown explains most of the drop in metro growth from 1.1 percent in 2023 to 2024 to 0.6 percent in 2024 to 2025. Nationally the net international migration rate fell from 8.08 to 3.70 per 1,000, and nine in ten counties had lower net international migration than a year earlier. Metros as a group continued to lose people to domestic migration (minus 0.40 per 1,000), while micropolitan areas gained 2.38 per 1,000 and counties outside any metro or micro area gained 2.88. The 50 counties with 1 million or more residents lost a combined 637,634 people to domestic migration in 2024 to 2025.

Four metros, four different growth models

The Census Bureau publishes the components for every metro. The four metros below show how differently they can combine. Austin gained more from domestic migration than from abroad in 2024 to 2025. Atlanta grew mainly through international migration and births. Boston and Baltimore lost residents to the rest of the country and relied on immigration and births to grow.

Opposite domestic flows: Austin gained 19,860 people from other parts of the US in one year, while Boston lost 29,132.

Source: US Census Bureau, CBSA-EST2025-ALLDATA (Vintage 2025). Components summed by BusinessStats for the periods April 1 to July 1, 2020 and each year from 2021 to 2025. Total change runs from the April 1, 2020 estimates base to July 1, 2025 and includes a small residual, so components do not add up exactly.

The cumulative figures make the contrast sharper. In Boston, net domestic migration since April 2020 (minus 170,015) was four times larger than natural increase (42,074), so international migration (220,820) accounted for more than the entire net gain of 89,502. In Austin, by contrast, domestic movers were the largest single source of growth, adding 153,121 people. Natural increase depends heavily on age structure, which we track nationally in our population of the US by sex and age, and the ethnic makeup of the population is covered in our US population by race report.

City limits, metro areas and combined areas measure different things

The Office of Management and Budget defines the areas and the Census Bureau estimates their populations. Under OMB Bulletin 23-01 of 21 July 2023, there are 393 metropolitan statistical areas, 387 in the United States and 6 in Puerto Rico, and 542 micropolitan statistical areas, 538 in the United States and 4 in Puerto Rico. A metro area needs at least one urban area of 50,000 or more people, and a micropolitan area one urban area of at least 10,000 but less than 50,000. The bulletin also defines 184 combined statistical areas and 37 metropolitan divisions, which split the largest metros into smaller parts.

Overwhelmingly metropolitan: 86.4 percent of US residents live in a metro area, 8.3 percent in a micro area and 5.3 percent outside both.

The difference between a city and its metro area can be very large. New York city had 8,584,629 residents on July 1, 2025, only 42.7 percent of its metro population. Atlanta city had 529,110 residents, just 8.2 percent of a metro of nearly 6.5 million. In Dallas-Fort Worth, the city of Dallas (1,329,491) accounts for 15.7 percent of the metro, and Fort Worth is a separate city of 1,028,117. At the other extreme, the city of San Antonio holds 55.0 percent of its metro population.

Same name, different place: fewer than one in ten people in the Atlanta metro live in the city of Atlanta.

This is why city and metro rankings diverge. Phoenix city (1,665,481) has more residents than Philadelphia city (1,574,281), but the Philadelphia metro is 1.1 million people larger than the Phoenix metro. San Antonio is the seventh largest US city with 1,548,422 residents but only the 24th largest metro. New York is the extreme case on the other side: the city lost 12,196 residents between 2024 and 2025, the largest numeric decrease of any US city, while the metro as a whole still grew by 32,361. Global comparisons of urban areas use yet another definition; see our ranking of the largest cities in the world. For other ways of slicing the national population, browse our demographics topic overview.

Combined statistical areas join neighboring metros into one region

A combined statistical area (CSA) links adjacent metro and micro areas whose economies are connected by commuting, but at a lower level than the ties that hold a single metro together. CSAs are the closest official match to what many people call a region. In the New York area, for example, the CSA adds nearby metros such as Bridgeport-Stamford-Danbury and Trenton-Princeton to the core metro.

The effect can be large. The Boston-Worcester-Providence CSA had 8,521,063 residents on July 1, 2025, 1.69 times the 5,034,221 in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton metro. The Atlanta--Athens-Clarke County--Sandy Springs CSA had 7,426,769 residents, 944,587 more than the Atlanta metro. When comparing figures from different sources, check whether they refer to a city, an MSA or a CSA, because the same name can describe populations that differ by millions. The same caution applies to regional economic data, which is usually published for metro areas and then summed into the national figures in our GDP of the United States report.

How these figures were compiled

• Source and date. All metro populations are Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates for July 1, 2025, released on 26 March 2026. These are the most recent official metro estimates available.
• Revisions. Each vintage revises every year back to 2020. The July 2024 values in this report come from Vintage 2025 and can differ from the figures published in 2025.
• Boundaries. All areas follow OMB Bulletin 23-01 (July 2023). Several metros were renamed or redrawn, for example Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands and Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, and the New York metro no longer includes Pennsylvania. Lists that use older names or boundaries are not directly comparable.
• Five year change. Measured from the July 1, 2020 estimate, the first annual estimate in the series. The Census Bureau also publishes an April 1, 2020 estimates base, which can differ by several thousand people; for Atlanta the base was 6,106,816 against 6,120,770 in July 2020.
• Annual series. July 1 values for 2020 to 2024 were taken from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED database, which republishes the Census Bureau series, and checked against Census tables wherever they overlap.
• Components. Natural change, net international migration and net domestic migration come from the Census CBSA-EST2025-ALLDATA file. A small residual is not assigned to any component.
• Puerto Rico. The rankings cover the 387 metro areas in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
• Previous edition. The earlier version of this page used rounded figures, labeled projections as 2026 data and contained several growth figures that do not match the Census estimates. All numbers have been replaced with the official Vintage 2025 values.

US metro areas in eight numbers

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