List of cities and towns in Poland

Map of Poland

This is a list of cities and towns in Poland, consisting of four sections: the full list of all 107 cities in Poland by size, followed by a description of the principal metropolitan areas of the country, the table of the most populated cities and towns in Poland, and finally, the full alphabetical list of all 107 Polish cities and 861 towns combined.

As of 30 April 2022, there are altogether 2477 municipalities (gmina) in Poland:

  • 1513 of them are rural gminas containing exclusively rural areas, each of them forms a part of one of the 314 regular powiats, but never as its seat,
  • the remaining 968 ones contain a locality classified either as a city or a town, among them:
    • 666 towns are managed together with their rural surroundings under a single local government in the form of an eponymous urban-rural gmina typically seated in such town (though not always; currently, Gmina Nowe Skalmierzyce is the only urban-rural gmina seated elsewhere than in the town); such mixed municipalities always form part of a regular powiat, sometimes seated in such town, in such case being usually an eponymous one (though there are some exceptions; e.g. Warsaw West County is seated in the town Ożarów Mazowiecki while Gdańsk County is seated in the town Pruszcz Gdański, although their names would suggest otherwise; in addition, two binominal "hyphen" counties seated in such towns have been named so due to long-established animosity between a pair of towns similar in size, in order to placate both competing populations, namely Strzelce-Drezdenko County and Ropczyce-Sędziszów County; finally, the mountainuous Bieszczady County has been named after the mountain range rather than its seat)
    • 302 cities and towns are standalone as an urban gmina; nevertheless some of them be also a seat of an eponymous rural gmina surrounding it (the latter thus being often doughnut-shaped), despite not being a part of its territory;
      • 195 standalone towns, each of them forming a part of a regular powiat and sometimes being its seat, in the latter case usually an eponymous one, though there are three exceptions (two of them are binominal "hyphen" counties, with Czarnków-Trzcianka County named so due to a long-established animosity between a pair of towns similar in size, while Bieruń-Lędziny County acquired its name when the decision was taken to have its seat relocated from its original location in Tychy, a city with powiat rights, to one of these two conpeting towns; the third exception is the mountainuous Tatra County named after the mountain range rather than its seat)
      • 107 cities (governed by a city mayor or prezydent miasta), among them:
        • 41 cities form along with two or more other municipalities an eponymous regular powiat, seated always in the city
        • 66 cities hold status of a city with powiat rights (an independent city) which is an urban gmina operating also as a powiat in its own right within a voivodeship; nevertheless, it may be also a seat of a regular powiat, in such case usually an eponymous one (with two exceptions, namely the Łódź East County bearing the additional designation East because of bordering the city only to the west, as well as the mountainuous Karkonosze County seated in Jelenia Góra but named after the mountain range rather than its seat) despite not being included in the territory of the county (the latter thus being often doughnut-shaped)
          • 37 cities are over 100,000, including
            • 18 cities which serve as a seat for voivode or the voivodeship sejmik, thus being informally called voivodeship cities or capitals (in spite of only 16 voivodeships existing in Poland; the discrepancy is caused by the fact that both institutions are seated in a single capital city in only 14 of the 16 voivodeships, while in each of the remaining two they are divided equally between a pair of capital cities),
              • 11 of them are seats of an appeal court and other supra-voivodeship institutions,
                • They include the capital city of the country, the only Polish city with population exceeding 1,000,000, and the only one governed by a dedicated act of Parliament.

In some cases, a city with powiat rights may also be a seat of both an eponymous rural gmina and an eponymous regular powiat, despite belonging to neither, e.g. Siedlce, Skierniewice, Słupsk. No city in Poland constitutes a separate voivodeship in its own right, though 5 cities held such status in the past.