The fastest urbanizing countries of the past 25 years depend on how "urban" is measured. Counting each country's own urban areas, the share of people living in them rose most between 2000 and 2025 in Nepal (+35.9), Equatorial Guinea (+32.8), Thailand (+31.3), Türkiye (+30.5) and China (+29.9), in percentage points, according to the UN's World Urbanization Prospects 2025. On the UN's new harmonised grid, which applies one density rule everywhere, the leaders are Uganda (+30.2), Equatorial Guinea (+30.1) and Malawi (+30.0), a near-tie, followed by Burundi (+26.2) and South Sudan (+25.3). Measured instead by how fast the urban population itself grew, Burundi leads: its urban population grew by 8.2% a year on its own definition.
Only Equatorial Guinea makes the top three on both lists. Across the 161 countries with at least a million people, the correlation between the two measures is just 0.37, and only 6 countries appear in both top 20s. China, Nepal and Malawi show why: three countries, three different paths.
Two rulers for one word
For decades the UN's urbanization figures were simply what each government reported, and governments define "urban" in their own ways: Nepal counts everyone living in a municipality, Türkiye localities of 20,000 people or more, according to the UN's data-sources file. The World Bank's "urban population (% of total)" indicator is this same series; its 2025 values match the UN's to the decimal, so it is no second opinion.
The 2025 edition adds a second ruler, the Degree of Urbanisation, endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission in 2020, which lays a grid of one-kilometre squares over the planet. A city is a contiguous patch of squares with at least 1,500 people per square kilometre and 50,000 people in all; towns and semi-dense areas are patches with at least 300 people per square kilometre and 5,000 in all; everything else is rural, as the UN's FAQ sets out. Wherever this article says "the grid", it means cities plus towns and semi-dense areas.
The two rulers disagree even about the world. On national definitions, 46.8% of humanity was urban in 2000 and 57.8% in 2025. On the grid, the share in cities, towns and semi-dense areas went from 76.3% to 80.4%, and the share in cities alone from 39.4% to 44.8%. In 105 of the 161 ranked countries, the grid puts more people in cities and towns than the national count does. India is the starkest large example: 35.7% urban by its own definition, 84.1% on the grid.
China: 477 million more city dwellers, and a grid that barely blinks
China is the path most people picture: hundreds of millions moving from farms to cities. On its own definition, China went from 36.4% urban in 2000 to 66.3% in 2025, a rise of 29.9 points that ranks 5th in the world, and the UN series puts the year it passed half at 2011. In absolute numbers, nothing else comes close: China's urban population grew by 477 million over the period, to 939 million, against 230 million for India, the next-largest gain.
China's statisticians report slightly higher figures. The 2020 census found 63.89 percent living in urban areas, though only 45.4 percent were urban by household registration (hukou), according to the census communiqué. The National Bureau of Statistics put the urbanization rate at 67.89 percent at the end of 2025, up 0.89 points in a year, in its 2025 statistical communiqué. The UN's mid-2025 estimate of 66.3% sits about a point and a half below that year-end figure.
The grid disagrees about China's countryside, not its cities. The share in cities alone rose from 37.1% to 44.2%, so both rulers see people pouring into cities. But cities, towns and semi-dense areas together moved only from 81.5% to 83.7%, which ranks China 106th on the grid. The reason is that much of rural China was already settled at more than 300 people per square kilometre in 2000: the grid put 44.5% of the population in towns and semi-dense areas that year. Migration moved people from one grid class to another while barely changing the total. For the country's wider demographic picture, see our guide to the population of China.
Nepal: urban by decree
Nepal tops the national-definitions ranking, rising from 31.1% urban in 2000 to 67.0% in 2025, a gain of 35.9 points. Most of it is not people moving. It is the map being redrawn.
At the 2011 census, 17.1 percent of Nepalis lived in the country's 58 municipalities, according to a Ministry of Urban Development report. The government then declared new municipalities in waves; before the 2017 restructuring of local government, 217 of them held more than a third of the population, the same report says. Today there are 293, including six metropolitan cities, according to a 2023 study of Nepal's urbanization. At the 2021 census, 66.17 percent of the population lived in metropolitan, sub-metropolitan and municipal areas, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported. The UN's estimate for 2021 is 66.1%, so the end point agrees.
The UN's data-sources file shows that for 2011 it used the municipalities later declared by the government, giving 63.1% rather than the census's 17.1 percent. That puts most of Nepal's jump in the UN series between 2000 (31.1%) and 2010 (62.0%), a decade after which the 2011 census, on the map of the time, found 17.1 percent.
The grid ignores municipal boundaries and sees a slower climb: from 66.9% in 2000 to 73.3% in 2025, a rise of 6.4 points that ranks 49th. Nepal's National Statistics Office found the same when it applied the method to census wards: the urban share rose from 22.31 to 27.07 percent between 2011 and 2021, and the peri-urban share from 39.19 to 39.75 percent, HimalPress reported. The UN grid shows 70.6% to 72.7% over the same decade. Nepal's towns are growing, and the grid's cities-only share reached 19.0% in 2025, in places like those in our guide to the largest cities in Nepal. But a near-quadrupling of the official share since 2011 is mostly a change of labels.
Türkiye did something similar. Its national share jumps from 69.3% in 2010 to 87.2% in 2015 in the UN series. TurkStat's urban rate leapt from 77.3 percent in 2012 to 91.3 percent in 2013, Hürriyet Daily News reported, after Law No. 6360 folded villages into the metropolitan municipalities of 30 provinces. On the grid, Türkiye rose just 6.2 points. Thailand, third on national definitions with 31.3 points, rose 9.4 on the grid.
Malawi: a crowded countryside the official count leaves out
Malawi is the mirror image. By its own count it is the second-least urbanized of the 161 ranked countries, and barely changing: 14.7% urban in 2000, 17.6% in 2025, a rise of 2.9 points that ranks 120th. The 2018 census found 16 percent of the population in urban areas, up from 14.4 percent in 1998 and 15.3 percent in 2008, and the National Statistical Office's report calls the increase marginal.
On the grid, Malawi went from 40.6% to 70.6%, a rise of 30.0 points, level with Uganda and Equatorial Guinea at the top of the ranking. Its population almost doubled, from 11.3 million to 22.2 million, and most of the newcomers stayed on the land. The UN's finer breakdown shows it: the share living in suburban or peri-urban squares, the semi-dense class, rose from 25.7% to 45.0%, while the share in cities went only from 7.9% to 11.3%. Farm villages filled in until large stretches of countryside passed 300 people per square kilometre.
Neither ruler is wrong. Malawi's statistics office counts places with town government and planning; the grid counts how closely people live. The UN's FAQ notes that national definitions often class such places as rural in sub-Saharan Africa and in Central and Southern Asia, and that the link between urbanization and income is far weaker on the grid.
Uganda sits between the two paths. Its official definition counts gazetted cities, municipalities and towns, and on it the share rose from 11.6% to 31.9% (+20.3 points), while the grid rose from 46.5% to 76.7% (+30.2). The UN's newest Ugandan input is the 2014 census; the 2024 census found 36.6 percent of the household population in urban areas, well above the UN's 31.3% for 2024, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.
The full leaderboard, and Equatorial Guinea's new cities
Equatorial Guinea, near the top of both lists, is the clearest case of city-building. Its official share rose from 38.8% to 71.6% (+32.8 points) and its grid share by 30.1. On the strictest measure, cities alone, it rose from 37.5% to 83.5%, a gain of 46.0 points that no other country matches; Qatar (+34.2) and Oman (+26.4) come next.
| # | Country | Own definition, % urban 2000 → 2025 | Change (points) | UN grid, % in cities and towns 2000 → 2025 | Change (points) | Rank on UN grid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nepal | 31.1 → 67.0 | +35.9 | 66.9 → 73.3 | +6.4 | 49 |
| 2 | Equatorial Guinea | 38.8 → 71.6 | +32.8 | 60.0 → 90.1 | +30.1 | 2 |
| 3 | Thailand | 31.5 → 62.8 | +31.3 | 52.9 → 62.3 | +9.4 | 26 |
| 4 | Türkiye | 59.0 → 89.5 | +30.5 | 76.6 → 82.8 | +6.2 | 53 |
| 5 | China | 36.4 → 66.3 | +29.9 | 81.5 → 83.7 | +2.2 | 106 |
| 6 | Lesotho | 19.3 → 44.7 | +25.3 | 37.8 → 40.2 | +2.5 | 101 |
| 7 | Mauritania | 38.1 → 61.5 | +23.4 | 49.0 → 61.0 | +11.9 | 16 |
| 8 | Cambodia | 18.6 → 41.1 | +22.5 | 65.0 → 69.2 | +4.2 | 78 |
| 9 | Somalia | 33.1 → 55.1 | +22.1 | 78.3 → 82.6 | +4.3 | 76 |
| 10 | Angola | 50.5 → 71.5 | +21.0 | 68.1 → 76.0 | +7.8 | 36 |
| 11 | Costa Rica | 59.0 → 79.7 | +20.7 | 71.9 → 74.1 | +2.2 | 105 |
| 12 | Nigeria | 43.3 → 63.8 | +20.5 | 77.0 → 81.8 | +4.7 | 70 |
| 13 | Uganda | 11.6 → 31.9 | +20.3 | 46.5 → 76.7 | +30.2 | 1 |
| 14 | Syria | 51.9 → 72.1 | +20.2 | 74.8 → 81.8 | +7.1 | 40 |
| 15 | El Salvador | 56.6 → 75.5 | +19.0 | 77.1 → 76.7 | −0.4 | 147 |
Shares hide sheer numbers. Burundi's official urban share rose from 8.0% to 25.7%, but its urban population grew 8.2% a year, the fastest of any ranked country, with Uganda next at 7.3%. On the grid, Qatar's cities and towns grew fastest, at 6.8% a year. At the other end, 12 ranked countries saw their official urban share fall over the 25 years.
How the numbers were worked out
Every figure comes from the UN's World Urbanization Prospects 2025 country files: national definitions, and the Degree of Urbanisation at its broad and detailed levels. Shares are for 1 July; 2025 values are UN estimates, not census counts, and both files share one total population, so the shares compare directly. Growth rates are compound annual rates. Rankings cover the 161 countries and territories with at least a million people in 2025. The CSV holds every country, ranked or not, with both measures, the cities-only share and both growth rates: download the data as a CSV. To slice it by region or plot your own pair of rulers, Parity can turn the file into charts without any code. Sources:
- UN DESA Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects 2025: country files by Degree of Urbanization (Level 1 and Level 2) and by national definitions (CSV): Released 18 November 2025. Mid-year population by settlement class for 237 countries and areas, 1950–2050 (estimates to 2025, projections after). © United Nations, CC BY 3.0 IGO.
- UN DESA Population Division, WUP 2025 data sources file M02 (national definitions and census points): Lists the census or estimate behind each national urban figure and the definition used. CC BY 3.0 IGO.
- UN DESA, WUP 2025 frequently asked questions: Definitions of cities, towns and semi-dense areas, and rural areas.
- Natural Earth country boundaries via world-atlas (1:50m): Public domain. Map only.
The two rankings are less a contradiction than a reminder to ask which ruler a headline used: China's cities gained hundreds of millions of people, Nepal mostly gained a new map, and Malawi's countryside filled up while its official count stood still, a contrast that also runs through our guide to the world's rural populations.