Turkish Statistical Institute in the context of "List of largest cities and towns in Turkey"

This is a list of the largest cities and towns in Turkey by population, which includes cities and towns that are provincial capitals or have a population of at least 7,000. The total population of Turkey is 85,824,854 according to the 2025 mid-year estimate, making it the 18th most populated country in the world.

Since there are no defined city borders in Turkey and Turkish Statistical Institute publishes only the province and district populations, it is hard to estimate the exact populations of urban areas. However a rough estimate of the top cities are as follows.

Throughout most of its history, Istanbul has ranked among the largest cities in the world. By 500 CE, Constantinople had somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 people, edging out its predecessor, Rome, for world's largest city. Constantinople jostled with other major historical cities, such as Baghdad, Chang'an, Kaifeng and Merv for the position of world's most populous city until the 12th century. It never returned to being the world's largest, but remained Europe's largest city from 1500 to 1750, when it was surpassed by London.

The Turkish Statistical Institute estimates that the population of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality was 15,701,602 at the end of 2024, hosting 18 percent of the country's population. Then about 97–98% of the inhabitants of the metropolitan municipality were within city limits, up from 89% in 2007 and 61% in 1980. 64.9% of the residents live on the European side and 35.1% on the Asian side. While the city ranks as the world's 5th-largest city proper, it drops to the 24th place as an urban area and to the 18th place as a metro area because the city limits are roughly equivalent to the agglomeration. Today, it forms one of the largest urban agglomerations in Europe, alongside Moscow. The city's annual population growth of 3.45 percent ranks as the highest among the seventy-eight largest metropolises in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The high population growth mirrors an urbanization trend across the country, as the second and third fastest-growing OECD metropolises are the Turkish cities of İzmir and Ankara.

Municipalities (Turkish: belediyeler) are the basic units of local government in Turkey. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute the population of Turkey was 76,667,864 as of 31 December 2013. The majority of the population live in settlements with municipalities. The number of municipalities in Turkey was 2,947 in 2009. But in 2013, most of the small town (Turkish: belde) municipalities were merged to district (Turkish: ilçe) municipalities by the Act 6360 which came into effect at the 2014 local elections sharply decreased the number of municipalities to 1,394.