A single global average can hide very different country stories.
The World Bank's urban-population series puts the world at 57.83% urban in 2025, up from 34.23% in 1960—a change of 23.60 percentage points. The same measure moves at very different speeds across countries.
| Country or area | 1960 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| World | 34.23% | 57.83% | +23.60 pp |
| Brazil | 44.68% | 88.18% | +43.50 pp |
| China | 19.75% | 66.34% | +46.59 pp |
| India | 17.93% | 35.69% | +17.76 pp |
| Canada | 69.04% | 82.88% | +13.84 pp |
| Bangladesh | 5.11% | 33.24% | +28.13 pp |
| Kenya | 8.23% | 32.21% | +23.98 pp |
| Egypt | 37.83% | 42.90% | +5.07 pp |
The headline is not simply that every place became more urban. Brazil and China started from different baselines but each gained more than 40 percentage points in this series. Canada started much higher and changed less. Egypt's reported share moved by about five points. Those comparisons make the global line more interesting, while still leaving plenty to investigate country by country.
A few cautions matter:
- These values are urban population as a share of total population, not the number of people living in cities.
- A percentage-point change is the direct subtraction between the two shares. It is not the same as percentage growth.
- Urban definitions and reporting practices can differ across countries, so the figures are useful for broad comparison but are not a perfect like-for-like measure of what counts as a city.
- The World Bank series is published historical data, not a live sensor. Recent years may be revised as estimates and national reporting are updated.
Source: World Bank: Urban population (% of total population). The World Bank API exposes the year-by-year series. Values above are rounded to two decimal places.
I built GlobalDataTracker.com to make country indicators easier to explore across places and years. You can compare this series with population, health, economy, environment, and other measures on the globe.
What country would you compare next—and which indicator gives you the most surprising long-run change?
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