How many people live in New York City?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the comparison in the explanation: more residents than forty states. American states run from under a million to nearly forty million, and a city that outranks forty of fifty sits somewhere in the eight-to-ten million band. Ranking against a known distribution is often easier than estimating a number.

The borough detail conveys the internal scale better than the total: one of its five boroughs would on its own be the fourth-largest city in the country. The city is a 1898 merger of what were separate municipalities, and each borough remains large enough to be a major city elsewhere.

The metro figure is more than double the city, spilling across three states, which is why "how big is New York" has at least three defensible answers. As with London, Paris and Los Angeles on this site, the boundary chosen determines the number far more than any measurement uncertainty does.