Largest cities in Switzerland: all 173 by population – and Zurich outnumbers Geneva and Basel combined

Zurich has 440,935 residents, St. Moritz 5,027, and officially both are cities. In between sit 171 more. The city right in the middle of the ranking is Herisau, with 16,100 residents. Every one of them is listed here, with rank, canton and growth since 2010, based on the federal population statistics as of end of 2025.

🏆 Largest cities in Switzerland: the top 50

Zurich has more residents than Geneva and Basel combined: 440,935 against 391,249. Switzerland has no second metropolis.

The 6 large cities with more than 100,000 residents are home to 13.6% of the population together, roughly one person in seven. The table shows the 50 largest cities by permanent resident population. It counts the municipality within its current boundaries, not the surrounding agglomeration.

📊 Cities by population: all 173 in the city ranking

Between first and last place lies a factor of 88: Zurich has about 88 times as many residents as St. Moritz, and yet both hold the same status.

Type in your city and the city ranking shows where it stands. Sort it by population, by growth since 2010 or by share of foreign nationals, and filter by canton and language region.

All 173 cities in Switzerland by population

Rank · city · canton · residents as of 31 December 2025. Official municipality names.

Method: rank by permanent resident population as of 31 December 2025 (FSO STATPOP). Every municipality the FSO classifies as a statistical city counts (2020 recalculation). Growth on today’s municipal territory, mergers included.

👥 Zurich population 2026: 440,935, and a small town added every year

Since 2010, Zurich has grown by 68,078 people. That is more than the entire population of Biel/Bienne, the country’s tenth-largest city (57,462).

In 2025 alone, 4,384 residents were added, almost as many as St. Moritz has in total. In percentage terms that is unspectacular: +18.3% since 2010 means rank 63 of 173. The whole Canton of Zurich has 1,632,918 residents, 67.9% of whom live in one of its 31 cities, more than any other canton has.

🥈 Geneva population: 211,152, and three suburbs in the top 30

Outside Geneva, hardly anyone has heard of Vernier. Yet with 38,769 residents, this suburban municipality is larger than La Chaux-de-Fonds (37,858) and Sion, the capital of Valais (37,844).

Geneva itself, with 211,152 residents, is Switzerland’s second-largest city. The canton has 12 statistical cities, three of them among the country’s 30 largest: Vernier (rank 18), Lancy (21) and Meyrin (30). In the Canton of Geneva, 82.0% of the population live in a city. Only Basel-Stadt ranks higher.

🏛️ Bern population: rank 5, and the city counts itself higher

The federal city is only Switzerland’s fifth-largest city: with 138,562 residents, Bern ranks behind Lausanne (145,596).

Check with the City of Bern and you will find a higher figure: 146,867 residents at the start of 2026. That is not a mistake but a different way of counting. Bern’s city statistics office counts every registered person, including the 7,407 Swiss weekly residents who sleep in Bern during the week and live elsewhere at weekends (2024). For a city with many jobs and training places that makes sense, since they too use the trams, schools and hospitals. But only the federal figure, collected the same way for all 2,110 municipalities, allows a comparison.

🔢 How many cities? 173 or 179, depending on how you count

Zermatt, with 6,113 residents, is a city. Gossau in the Zurich Oberland, with 10,621, is not. That is not a register error but a consequence of how the Federal Statistical Office defines a city.

Since the definition based on 2012 data, population alone no longer decides. A city needs a densely built centre, and it is not only residents who count: residents, jobs and overnight stays in hotels and clinics are added together. According to the FSO, a guest who stays at a hotel all year (365 nights) counts as much as someone who lives and works in the municipality, because they belong to both the daytime and the night-time population. Each overnight stay therefore counts twice. A municipality needs at least 14,000 of these units, and more than half of them must lie in the dense zone.

That is why Zermatt (6,113) and St. Moritz (5,027) count as cities: their hotel beds make them dense. And that is why 19 municipalities with more than 10,000 residents do not, such as Val-de-Travers (10,710), a merger of villages without a dense centre. The FSO cites exactly this example in its report on the definition.

That is why different figures circulate. In 2000, the 119 municipalities with more than 10,000 residents were tacitly treated as cities. The new definition, based on 2012 data and published in 2014, produced 162 cities. When the FSO recalculated it with 2020 data, 10 were added: Hochdorf, Küssnacht (SZ), Lachen, Landquart, Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, Rothrist, Rümlang, Veyrier, Widnau and Zuchwil.

The honest answer to “How many cities does Switzerland have?” is therefore: 173 by the official definition, 179 municipalities with at least 10,000 residents, and the two figures mean different things.

📈 Fastest growth: the top 5 are all in French-speaking Switzerland

The five fastest-growing cities in Switzerland are all in the French-speaking region: Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, Crissier, Bussigny, Bulle and Chêne-Bougeries. In the lead is Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, up from 5,557 to 9,790 residents, +76.2% since 2010, without a single municipal merger.

Winterthur is often named as a boom town and has grown by 19.2% since 2010. That is the top figure among the ten largest cities, but among all 173 it only reaches rank 59. Zurich stands at 18.3%, rank 63.

All comparisons use current municipal boundaries: where municipalities have merged, the FSO counts the whole of today’s territory for 2010 too. A merger therefore does not inflate growth.

📉 Where cities are shrinking

Only 4 of the 173 cities have fewer residents today than in 2010: Davos (−3.8%), St. Moritz (−3.4%), Le Locle (−2.0%) and Chiasso (−0.8%). Among them are two of the country’s best-known mountain resorts, Davos and St. Moritz.

🗺️ Cities by canton: Glarus is more urban than Zurich

According to the ConvivaPlus City Index, 77.3% of the population of the Canton of Glarus live in a city, compared with 67.9% in the Canton of Zurich. The mountain canton with its open-air assembly is, statistically, more urban than the canton of the largest city.

The reason is not urban sprawl but a municipal boundary. In 2011, Glarus merged its 25 municipalities into three. Two of them, Glarus Nord (19,849) and Glarus (12,968), are large and dense enough to qualify as cities, and the status always applies to the whole municipality. Anyone living in Mollis or Bilten has, statistically, lived in a city ever since.

Across Switzerland, 48.8% of the population live in one of the 173 cities, less than half. The most urban canton is Basel-Stadt with 99.4%: only Bettingen is not a city there. Appenzell Innerrhoden is the only canton without a single city: even its main town, Appenzell, does not reach the threshold. This is how the ConvivaPlus City Index works: for each canton, we add up the residents of all statistical cities and divide them by the cantonal population, both figures from the FSO. The FSO does not publish this share: it is a ConvivaPlus analysis.

🌍 Foreign residents by city: Kreuzlingen ahead of Geneva

In 5 Swiss cities, most residents do not hold a Swiss passport. The highest share is not in Geneva but in Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance: 57.2%, against 50.6% in Geneva.

The other cities with a foreign majority are Rorschach, Spreitenbach and Renens (VD). At the other end are three cities in the Canton of Bern: Steffisburg (12.6%), Münsingen (13.1%) and Spiez (14.8%). Across all 173 cities, about one resident in three has no Swiss passport (33.7%). Foreign nationals here means people without Swiss citizenship, including those born in Switzerland.

🗣️ Cities by language: 127 German, 41 French, 5 Italian

Not a single Swiss city lies in the Romansh-speaking region. Of the 173 cities, 127 are in the German-speaking region, 41 in the French-speaking and 5 in the Italian-speaking region.

The largest French-speaking city is Geneva, the largest Italian-speaking one Lugano at rank 9, ahead of Bellinzona at rank 11. The other Ticino cities are Locarno, Mendrisio and Chiasso. Biel/Bienne is officially bilingual and the FSO assigns it to the German-speaking region, Fribourg to the French-speaking one.

Written by

Reto Amrein

ConvivaPlus Editor · Money & Work

Writes about wages, taxes, insurance and pensions – verifiable figures with a source.

• Wages
• Taxes
• Insurance
• Pensions

Researched & sourced · for Switzerland

Profile & all articles →·Our editorial teamUpdated 10/16/2026

📰 Data and charts for the media

Free to use, including commercially, under CC BY 4.0. Please credit both sources: the primary source and ConvivaPlus. Licence CC BY 4.0

Tables (CSV, opens in Excel)

• ⬇ All 173 citiescities-switzerland.csv · 173 rows
• ⬇ Cities by canton (26)cities-by-canton-switzerland.csv · 26 rows

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How to cite

Data: FSO, STATPOP 2025 and spatial divisions of Switzerland · Processing: ConvivaPlus, «Largest cities in Switzerland 2026: top 50 and all 173», https://www.conviva-plus.ch/en?page=2067 (Data as of 16 October 2026), CC BY 4.0

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