Topics
Detroit, 
United States
809,894 people lived in Detroit in 2025. It is the 653rd largest of the world's 12,138 cities, and the 26th largest in the United States.
Like every city on this site, Detroit is counted as a built-up area seen from above rather than as a city government's territory. Why that changes the number.
Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries
People · every five years · 1975 to 2050
How Detroit grew
Count 10 people in Detroit in 1975 and the same count gives 7.5 in 2025 — the city lost people.
On the UN's projection it will have 712,171 people in 2050.
projected (after 2025) · how sure the UN is: high moderate low
How to read this: read it left to right, 1975 to 2050, one column every five years, the height being people. Hatching marks the projected years. Below, a strip of the UN's confidence: strong colour where the census maps are recent and detailed, pale where they are not, blank where the place was not counted as a city.
People · your family's years · 1975 to 2050
Detroit through your family’s years
Put in the years your family were born. You’ll see how many people lived in Detroit in each of those years, and when each of them turned 30.
United States · every city · 2025
Where it is
How to read this: every dot is one of the 348 cities in the United States in 2025, and a dot's area is how many people live there, the biggest being New York City. The ringed dot in colour is Detroit; the grey dots are the rest. The outlines around them are neighbouring countries.
Area and built-up land · km²
How much land it covers
In 2025, Detroit covered 403 km², and buildings, roads and other built-up land covered 106 km² of it. That is 131 m² of built-up land for each person, about a square 11 by 11 metres. Since 1975, its built-up land is about the same size, and its people have fallen by 25%.
How to read this: the outer pale square stands for all the land the city covers, and the solid square inside it for the part with buildings, roads and the like on it. All three squares share a scale, so you can compare them by eye. A hatched one is a year the UN has projected.
Of every 100 people in the United States
Its share of the United States
Of every 1,000 people in the United States in 2025, 2 lived in Detroit, which is 809,894 people.
How to read this: 1,000 squares, one for every 1,000th person in the United States; the coloured squares live in Detroit. The grey rest live in other cities, in towns or in the countryside.
Ranked by people · 2025
Cities of a similar size
In the world, 2025
- 649 Mit Ghamr Egypt812,947
- 650 Sukkur Pakistan812,885
- 651 Barquisimeto Venezuela812,384
- 652 Quzhou China811,735
- 653 Detroit809,894
- 654 Goma Democratic Republic of the Congo809,601
- 655 Pontianak Indonesia808,759
- 656 Udaipur India807,617
- 657 Jining China803,706
In the United States, 2025
- 370 Fort Lauderdale1,368,027
- 451 Baltimore1,145,219
- 466 Minneapolis [Saint Paul]1,107,243
- 595 Saint Petersburg877,183
- 653 Detroit809,894
- 732 Columbus731,335
- 764 Milwaukee701,928
- 785 Fresno685,330
- 817 St. Louis663,392
How to read this: the figure in front of a name is where that city stands among the 12,138 cities the UN counted in 2025, and each bar is its people, on one scale per list. Numbers are missing where a city has fewer than 300,000 people and so has no page of its own.
Apparatus
Sources and method
The figures for Detroit are the UN's own, at five-year steps: an estimate for each of 1975 to 2025, then projection to 2050. Projected years are drawn hatched, and the UN publishes no range of uncertainty for a city. What a city means here, how the UN measures one, and why that number can differ from the one Detroit publishes about itself: how the figures here are put together.
Sources: UN WUP 2025 · Natural Earth · flag-icons. Every source, its licence and how to cite it →
Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries