How many people live in Brazil?
Guess before you scroll — the answer is below
The answer
212,000,000 people
Roughly 212M.
Brazil has about 212 million people, the largest country in Latin America by a wide margin and the seventh most populous on Earth. Roughly 87% of them live in cities, a higher urban share than the United States.
How to get close to this number
Place it among the largest countries. The most populous countries run to well over a billion each, then a large gap, then a cluster of countries in the hundreds of millions. A country described as seventh most populous belongs in that cluster, which puts it around two hundred million.
The urban share is the surprising detail: around eighty-seven percent live in cities, which is a higher proportion than in the United States. The mental image of this country is rainforest and countryside, and the reality is one of the most urbanised large populations on Earth, concentrated along the coast.
That urbanisation happened extremely fast, within living memory, as agricultural mechanisation and internal migration emptied the interior into coastal cities. Rapid urbanisation is why several of the world's largest metropolitan areas are in this part of the world, and why urban infrastructure lagged so far behind the population it had to serve.
Where this number comes from
| Source | Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) |
|---|---|
| Figure refers to | 2024 |
| Last checked | |
| Unit | people |
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