City time series

Lagos's urban expansion: 1975–2025, built-up area 1.7×

Nigeria
GHSL epochs 1975–2025

At a glance

Lagos's built-up area grew from about 242 km² in 1975 to 416 km² in 2025 — 1.7× the 1975 footprint, or +1.1% per year compounded.
Over the same window the urban centre's population 4.5×, reaching about 12.8M by 2025.
The current footprint of 416 km² is equivalent to about 122 Central Parks.

Key growth numbers

Built-up area 1.7× +1.1% per year since 1975
Population 4.5× about 12.8M in 2025
GHSL epochs 11 five-year steps, no interpolation

Lagos: population and built-up area, epoch by epoch

Lagos per GHSL epoch, 1975–2025. Left axis: population; right axis: built-up km². Population Built-up km²

Lagos

City outline: the GHSL urban-centre boundary, simplified for display — illustrative, not a navigable boundary.

Data table

Population and built-up area per GHSL epoch
Epoch	Population	Built-up km²
1975	2.9M	242 km²
1980	3.6M	251 km²
1985	4.6M	262 km²
1990	5.9M	274 km²
1995	6.9M	284 km²
2000	7.9M	296 km²
2005	9M	322 km²
2010	9.9M	359 km²
2015	10.8M	401 km²
2020	11.7M	411 km²
2025	12.8M	416 km²

Method & data

All numbers come from the GHS Urban Centre Database (GHSL): the European Commission's Joint Research Centre publishes, for every urban centre on Earth, the total built-up area and resident population on five-year epochs from 1975 to 2025.

An epoch is a full mapping pass, not an estimate for that calendar year; a metric the source does not report for an epoch is shown as missing — values are never interpolated or extrapolated between epochs.

The numbers stay inside the GHSL Urban Centre boundary — a stable, data-derived footprint of the contiguous built-up core, not an administrative city limit; figures are therefore not comparable to city-proper census counts.

A night-lights curve (VIIRS) is planned as a second series and is not part of this page yet; the epoch table above is the complete published dataset for this city.

Frequently asked questions

How much has Lagos grown between 1975 and 2025?

Lagos's built-up area expanded 1.7× — from roughly 242 km² to 416 km² inside the GHSL urban-centre boundary.

How many people live in Lagos as of 2025?

The GHSL epoch for 2025 reports about 12.8M people inside Lagos's urban centre.

Where do these numbers come from?

From the GHS Urban Centre Database (GHSL), published free and openly by the European Commission — see the method section above for the epoch semantics.

Nigeria country profile: key metrics vs world median →

All city time-series pages →

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Data & method

GHS Urban Centre Database R2024A, European Commission Joint Research Centre (CC BY 4.0); built-up area and population per five-year epoch, consumed unmodified from the tabular release.