What percentage of the world’s population lives in urban areas, as each country defines them?

How to get close to this number

Reason from the direction of travel. Urbanisation has risen continuously for two centuries and passed the halfway mark relatively recently, so the answer must be above fifty percent but not dramatically so. Somewhere in the high fifties is the right band.

The crossover date in the explanation is the one worth remembering: around 2007 was the first time in human history that most people did not live in the countryside. That is astonishingly recent for a transition that feels like it defines the modern world.

The definition does a lot of the work. Each country decides what counts as urban — some by population thresholds, some by administrative status — and this question uses those national definitions. The UN's 2025 method counts only large, dense cities and puts towns in a category of their own, which is how the same world can be 58% urban and only 45% city-dwelling at the same time.