Southampton, United Kingdom

For every 10 people in Southampton in 1975, there were 14.3 in 2025.

On the UN's projection it will have 409,569 people in 2050. It passed 250,000 people between 1990 and 1995.

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.

How to read this: every dot is one of the 150 cities in the United Kingdom in 2025, and a dot's area is how many people live there, the biggest being London. The ringed dot in colour is Southampton; the grey dots are the rest. The outlines around them are neighbouring countries.

In 2025, Southampton covered 86 km², and buildings, roads and other built-up land covered 19 km² of it. That is 53 m² of built-up land for each person, about a square 7 by 7 metres. Since 1975, its built-up land has grown by 54%, and its people have grown by 43%.

How to read this: pale is the whole of the city's land; the stronger square inside it is what is actually built on. The three are drawn to the same scale, so a larger square really is more land, and hatching means the year is the UN's projection rather than a count.

Of every 1,000 people in the United Kingdom in 2025, 5 lived in Southampton, which is 347,446 people.

How to read this: 1,000 squares stand for everyone in the United Kingdom, one square for every 1,000th person. Count the coloured ones and you have Southampton's share; the grey remainder live somewhere else in the country.

In the world, 2025

1. 1643 Oruro Bolivia347,830
2. 1644 Kitchener Canada347,723
3. 1645 Portmore Jamaica347,722
4. 1646 Ondjiva Angola347,591
5. 1647 Southampton347,446
6. 1648 Mainpuri India347,106
7. 1649 Khammam India346,533
8. 1650 Burhanpur India346,277
9. 1651 Galle Sri Lanka346,263

In the United Kingdom, 2025

1. 1308 Coventry427,678
2. 1455 Cardiff390,692
3. 1473 Bournemouth386,557
4. 1637 Middlesbrough349,436
5. 1647 Southampton347,446
6. 1728 Stoke-on-Trent332,542
7. 1783 Hull322,100
8. 1877 Wakefield306,684
9. 2075 Southend-on-Sea280,158

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.

United Kingdom · All the world's cities

The figures for Southampton 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 Southampton 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