The largest urban area in Brazil is São Paulo, followed by Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. São Paulo has 19.5 million people on 2,111 km² of built-up land. 20 urban areas in Brazil have at least 1 million people or are a national capital; the table lists them all.
| # | City | Population |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | São Paulo | 19.5 million |
| 2 | Rio de Janeiro | 9.85 million |
| 3 | Belo Horizonte | 4.38 million |
| 4 | Recife | 3.85 million |
| 5 | Fortaleza | 3.32 million |
| 6 | Salvador | 3.31 million |
| 7 | Porto Alegre | 2.76 million |
| 8 | Curitiba | 2.51 million |
| 9 | Goiânia | 2.46 million |
| 10 | Manaus | 2.37 million |
| 11 | Belém | 2.19 million |
| 12 | Campinas | 1.83 million |
| 13 | Brasília | 1.80 million |
| 14 | Niterói–São Gonçalo | 1.73 million |
| 15 | Vitória | 1.29 million |
| 16 | São Luís | 1.27 million |
| 17 | Natal | 1.13 million |
| 18 | Santos | 1.13 million |
| 19 | João Pessoa | 1.12 million |
| 20 | Maceió | 1.05 million |
Urban area = contiguous built-up land and the people living in it in 2025, drawn the same way for every city regardless of administrative boundaries. Source: GHSL Urban Centre Database R2024A, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (CC BY 4.0); some names adjusted to the city names people use, and country attribution follows the dataset.
Official city limits are drawn differently in every country: some take in farmland and mountains, others stop at the historic core. Ranking cities by those limits mostly ranks boundary decisions. These lists use the built-up area instead, so a city's figure includes its suburbs wherever they are continuous with it, and nothing beyond.
For figures inside official limits, see the city-limits rankings; for the background, read how to compare city sizes honestly. Click any city to see it on a map at the same scale as another.