US Map / US Map with Cities

US Map with Major Cities

The largest cities of the United States, located on the map. Click through to any city's own map page, or open its state for wider context.

The 25 largest US cities

The full index covers the 100 largest US cities, with a map page for each — see all of them on the US cities map.

Why the biggest cities sit where they do

Almost every city on this list began at a break in transport — a place where goods had to change vehicle and someone had to handle them. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charleston are deepwater harbors at the mouths of rivers. Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee are Great Lakes ports at portages or river mouths. St. Louis, Memphis, Louisville and Cincinnati sit on the Mississippi–Ohio system, several of them at the exact point where rapids forced boats to unload. The Sun Belt cities are the exception and the reason the ranking keeps changing: Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Antonio and Fort Worth grew on air conditioning, water engineering and highways rather than on water transport.

Where American cities cluster

US cities are not spread evenly. The Northeast corridor from Boston through New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. is the densest urban chain in the country. Texas alone has six of the 25 largest cities. On the West Coast, cities line up along the Pacific from Seattle to San Diego, while the interior West stays sparse outside Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas — a pattern you can see clearly on the physical geography map, where mountains and deserts explain the gaps.

City limits are not the city

Every number here counts people inside a municipal boundary, and those boundaries were drawn at wildly different times. Phoenix annexed aggressively across the twentieth century and now covers hundreds of square miles; Boston, Miami and Atlanta are hemmed in by incorporated suburbs and stopped growing outward a century ago. That is why Jacksonville, at about 1.01 million in 2024, ranks tenth in the country while Boston at about 673,000 ranks twenty-sixth, even though the Boston metro area holds nearly five times as many people as Jacksonville does. Six entries — Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville, Lexington and Anchorage — are consolidated city-county governments whose city population is effectively a county population, and Honolulu is not an incorporated city at all but a census-designated place.

Note that many state capitals are missing from this list: see why capitals are often not the largest cities. For the counties these cities sit in, use the county map index.