The largest urban area in Nigeria is Lagos, followed by Onitsha region and Kano. Lagos has 12.8 million people on 1,199 km² of built-up land. 17 urban areas in Nigeria have at least 1 million people or are a national capital; the table lists them all.
| # | City | Population |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lagos | 12.8 million |
| 2 | Onitsha region | 5.79 million |
| 3 | Kano | 5.11 million |
| 4 | Ibadan | 4.04 million |
| 5 | Owerri region | 3.59 million |
| 6 | Port Harcourt | 2.62 million |
| 7 | Kaduna | 1.94 million |
| 8 | Benin City | 1.91 million |
| 9 | Warri region | 1.62 million |
| 10 | Uyo region | 1.61 million |
| 11 | Aba | 1.47 million |
| 12 | Ilorin | 1.36 million |
| 13 | Abuja | 1.32 million |
| 14 | Maiduguri | 1.29 million |
| 15 | Aboh region | 1.28 million |
| 16 | Enugu | 1.09 million |
| 17 | Okene | 1.04 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.
“Region” marks urban areas that join many towns and dense rural settlement into one built-up area; they are named after their main town.
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.