Europe Cities by Population 2024

With a few exceptions, the majority of European cities do not have huge populations. This is partly due to some European countries being relatively small and others having multiple major cities rather than one large capital city. For example, in the United Kingdom, London is the largest city (and the third-largest European city overall), with a population of around 7.5 million, but there are several other important cities, such as Nottingham, Liverpool and Birmingham that each have populations of close to a million.

Istanbul in Turkey and Moscow in Russia are by far the largest cities on the European continent (although some may dispute whether they are culturally European, and neither are part of the European Union). Istanbul has a population of almost fifteen million, while 2018 statistics show that Russia's largest city now has more than ten million residents (Saint Petersburg also makes the top five with a population of around five million).

However, these cities are definite outliers, with the statistics showing that populations of between one and three million are more typical for many major European cities, such as Rome (2.3 million), Paris (2.1 million), and Vienna (1.6 million). Europe is also home to plenty of much smaller, but still historically and culturally important, cities. These include Naples in Italy, with a population of around 950,000, Poland's Krakow (755,000) and Amsterdam in the Netherlands (741,000).