City time series

Tokyo's urban expansion: 1975–2025, built-up area 1.3×

Japan
GHSL epochs 1975–2025

At a glance

Tokyo's built-up area grew from about 1,112 km² in 1975 to 1,456 km² in 2025 — 1.3× the 1975 footprint, or +0.5% per year compounded.
Over the same window the urban centre's population 1.3×, reaching about 33.2M by 2025.
The epoch series peaks in 2020 at about 33.4M — later epochs report fewer people.
The current footprint of 1,456 km² is equivalent to about 427 Central Parks.

Key growth numbers

Built-up area 1.3× +0.5% per year since 1975
Population 1.3× about 33.2M in 2025
GHSL epochs 11 five-year steps, no interpolation

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

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

Tokyo

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	24.7M	1,112 km²
1980	26.4M	1,136 km²
1985	27.9M	1,160 km²
1990	29.2M	1,184 km²
1995	29.5M	1,250 km²
2000	30.6M	1,319 km²
2005	31.6M	1,353 km²
2010	32.6M	1,389 km²
2015	33.2M	1,423 km²
2020	33.4M	1,451 km²
2025	33.2M	1,456 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 Tokyo grown between 1975 and 2025?

Tokyo's built-up area expanded 1.3× — from roughly 1,112 km² to 1,456 km² inside the GHSL urban-centre boundary.

How many people live in Tokyo as of 2025?

The GHSL epoch for 2025 reports about 33.2M people inside Tokyo'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.

Japan 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.