The largest city in every state

New York City is the largest city in New York, which is obvious to most people. But did you know that the largest city in Vermont is Burlington, with 44,019 people? That's fewer people than in a single Manhattan ZIP code. That's the range this list covers: the biggest city in one state can be 190 times the size of the biggest city in another.

Here's the most populous city in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, ranked by population using the Census Bureau's 2025 estimates.

A few that fool people

The biggest surprises are the state capitals that aren't the biggest city, and the big cities people assume are capitals. Not one of the four largest cities on this list is a state capital. The capital that does top its state is often a smaller one: Columbus, Denver, Oklahoma City, and Nashville lead their states, but Springfield, Sacramento, Albany, and Austin do not lead theirs.

Florida is the cleanest trick. Its largest city is Jacksonville, not Miami, because Jacksonville merged with its county in 1968 and swallowed a huge land area, while Miami proper is a small slice of a sprawling metro. The same merger story explains why Nashville, Louisville, and Indianapolis sit so high: each combined its government with its county, so the "city" population counts the whole county.

That county-merger quirk is also why city rankings and metro rankings tell different stories. Miami dominates its metro area even though the city of Miami is modest, and the same holds across the country. For the version that captures whole regions, see the largest metro areas, and the full ranking of every city is at largest cities by population.

Sources

Population figures are the U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 population estimates for incorporated places and equivalents. Consolidated city-county governments (Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Honolulu) are counted as the Census Bureau reports them, which includes their merged county territory.