North Africa
How North Africa’s largest cities compare using one UN boundary method
Cairo reached an estimated 25.57 million residents in the UN’s harmonized 2025 city dataset. Alexandria, Casablanca and Luxor followed among cities in the four countries covered here. The estimates refer to continuous dense urban centres, which can extend across municipal lines.
Sources checked
- Algiers3,246.4 thousand residents
- Oran1,192.41 thousand residents
- Cairo25,566.102 thousand residents
- Alexandria7,266.957 thousand residents
- Luxor4,188.023 thousand residents
- Casablanca4,457.471 thousand residents
- Rabat2,069.287 thousand residents
- Tunis2,473.428 thousand residents
- Sfax608.293 thousand residents
Natural Earth land outlines and dashed land boundaries.
The map shows the two largest centres in each country and Luxor. Switch years to compare their reported populations.
Cairo and Alexandria were the two largest urban centres here
The UN estimated Cairo’s population at 25.57 million and Alexandria’s at 7.27 million in 2025. The same file estimates their 2000 populations at 15.68 million and 4.48 million. Both use the same UN city definition, which groups contiguous dense areas. Source 1 Source 2
Casablanca was larger than Morocco’s capital in this comparison
Casablanca reached 4.46 million in 2025 and Rabat 2.07 million. Algiers was Algeria’s largest estimated centre at 3.25 million, compared with Oran’s 1.19 million. Tunis led the three Tunisian centres in the table at 2.47 million, followed by Sfax and Sousse. Source 1
Luxor illustrates why a city boundary matters
The UN’s 2025 file gives the Luxor urban centre about 4.19 million residents. Its 2000 record was about 221,000. A change in the population of a continuous dense area can reflect expansion and the connection of settled areas. These figures do not imply that the same administrative municipality gained four million residents. Source 1 Source 2 Source 3
The table starts with a threshold in the comparison year
The selection contains 88 urban centres with at least 250,000 residents in 2025, including 55 in Egypt, 17 in Algeria, 13 in Morocco and three in Tunisia. It follows that same group backward. The map uses population-weighted positions from the UN and does not draw the underlying urban boundaries. Source 1 Source 2