The largest urban area in Iraq is Baghdad, followed by Basra and Mosul. Baghdad has 6.89 million people on 688 km² of built-up land. 9 urban areas in Iraq have at least 1 million people or are a national capital; the table lists them all.
| # | City | Population |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Baghdad | 6.89 million |
| 2 | Basra | 2.13 million |
| 3 | Mosul | 1.68 million |
| 4 | Erbil | 1.51 million |
| 5 | Najaf | 1.36 million |
| 6 | Kirkuk | 1.24 million |
| 7 | Duhok | 1.14 million |
| 8 | Karbala | 1.08 million |
| 9 | Hillah | 1.03 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.