The Most Important U.S. Cities
What are the Most Important Cities in the United States?
Mid 2025 Ratings

The “Global City Importance Model” (GCIM) scores urban areas according to their relative importance. It uses forty regularly updated data sources across four dimensions (economic, political, cultural, and demographic) to calculate importance, with economic output and international geopolitical influence comprising the largest scoring factors:

The numerical scores are then divided into five peer groups, or “tiers”, based on the importance of the cities within the tiers:

• Tier 1-Global City
• Tier 2-Major City
• Tier 3-Regional City
• Tier 4-Subregional City
• Tier 5-Locally Important City

Each tier is further divided into three groups or “ratings” (“A”, “B”, “C”), with similar scoring cities receiving the same rating. A special rating (“1-S”) is also created to clearly delineate the top scoring city.

Here are the 150 most important cities in the United States according to the Mid 2025 Model:

According to the Mid 2025 GCIM, New York is currently the most important U.S. city—followed by Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. These cities anchor the four current U.S. power centers—Wall Street (New York), the U.S. Government (Washington), Hollywood (Los Angeles), and Silicon Valley (San Francisco)—and have outsized global importance. As such, they are considered “Tier 1” or “Global” cities.

The next most important U.S. cities include Chicago, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, and Philadelphia—all of which are significant economic, population, and cultural centers. These eight cities are classified as “Tier 2” or “Major” cities.

Together, the U.S.’s “Tier 1” and “Tier 2” cities comprise more than 10% of the entire global economy.

Next, here’s a look at the most important urban areas across the U.S.’s geographical regions:

According to the Mid 2025 GCIM, these are the top cities in each U.S. region:

• Pacific Northwest and Mountain West: Seattle
• Midwest and Plains: Chicago
• Northeast: New York, followed by Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia
• California and Southwest: Los Angeles and San Francisco
• Texas / Gulf / Mississippi Delta / Ozark: Houston and Dallas
• Southeast: Atlanta and Miami

Finally, here’s a look at the most important urban areas across the most populous U.S. states:

Originally intended for cartographic use, the project began in 2007 and is currently in its 15th iteration.

Inspired by the Ranally City Rating System and the Chinese City Tier System, the ranking was born out of frustration with other city ranking projects, which too often focus solely on narrow metrics like the presence of professional service firms (e.g., GaWC) or on soft attributes like liveability, reputation, and ecological factors (e.g., Kearney, Oxford Economics)—rather than actual economic and political importance.

To read more about how the GCIM model works, click here.

“Importance”, in this context, is defined as the amount of influence, impact, and control a given city exerts upon the rest of the world. Put another way, it’s the degree of disruption (if any) the rest of the world would experience if a given city suddenly disappeared.

(It’s worth repeating that the model is not attempting to determine which cities are the best, the most livable, the most attractive, the most popular/famous, or the most connected—rather the model is focused on determining which cities are the most consequential.)

In this context, “city” is used as a simplified term for “urban area”, as defined by Demographia in the “Demographia World Urban Areas” project:

An urban area is a continuously built up land mass of urban development that is within a labor market. An urban area contains no rural land and is best thought of as the “urban footprint”—the lighted area or “city lights” that can be observed from an airplane or satellite on a clear night.

Apart from a handful of exceptions, the GCIM uses Demograhia’s urban area delineations for areas with populations greater than 500,000. For smaller areas, official government delineations are used. (For examples of U.S. urban areas, click here to view a map from the U.S. Census Bureau.)

The exceptions mentioned above are for urban areas that are sometimes combined in other sources or that display increasing evidence of functioning as a single urban area.

(It’s important to keep in mind that the model is evaluating cities at a global scale. So areas that are sometimes broken into separate urban areas for statistical or other nuanced reasons at the regional or national level—such as San Francisco and San Jose—are more meaningfully conceptualized as single areas at the zoomed out global level.)

In a handful of other cases, some cities that Demographia combines into single urban areas with other larger cities—such as Baltimore (combined with Washington) and New Haven (combined with New York)—receive their own ratings in the GCIM.

“Region” is being defined as one of the world’s nine major geographic and cultural regions: Northern America, Latin America (including Brazil and the Caribbean), Europe (excluding Russia and Turkey), the Middle East & North Africa (including Turkey), Sub-Saharan Africa, Russia & Central Asia (i.e., the Asian countries of the former Soviet Union), South Asia (including India), East & Southeast Asia, and Oceania.

“Global City” has become a bit of a loaded term in recent years, with different meanings in different contexts.

The model is titled the “Global City Importance Model” because it evaluates all cities globally—and because importance is evaluated relative to all other cities at the global level. (In contrast, some city ranking projects—e.g., Kearney, Global Power City Index—only rank a small set of pre-selected cities.)

Cities classified as “Global Cities” by the model are simply cities that have an outsized impact on the rest of the world—as measured by a combination of economic, political, cultural, and demographic factors. They have some degree of impact and influence across every region.

A city rated as “Major” is a city that has moderate importance globally. It has impact outside of its own region—but generally not across all regions. These cities often have a mix of both global and regional attributes and generally, but not always, have urban area populations greater than 5,000,000 and GDPs exceeding $500 billion USD annually.

Nearly all cities rated as “Major” function as capitals of top geopolitical powers, top international financial centers, or centers / “capitals” of important industries. There are approximately 50 cities rated as “Major” globally.

A city rated as “Regional” is a city that’s important within its larger region—but is of relatively low importance globally. These cities generally, but not always, have urban area populations greater than 500,000 and GDPs exceeding $50 billion USD annually.

There are approximately 250 cities rated as “Regional” globally.

A city rated as “Subregional” is a city that’s important within a section or “subregion” of one of the nine major regions listed above. It can be a city that’s important within a group of smaller countries (e.g., Southern Africa, the Balkans); a city that’s important within the whole of a medium-sized country (e.g., Spain, Saudi Arabia, South Africa); or a city that’s important within a section of larger country like the United States or China (e.g., the U.S. Midwest, North China).

“Subregional Cities” generally have urban area populations greater than 50,000 and GDPs exceeding $5 billion USD annually.

A city rated as “Locally Important” is a city that’s important within its immediate area—but not across its wider world region. They’re usually cities that are only important within a first-level administrative division of a country, such as an average-sized U.S. state. (Nearly all U.S. micropolitan cities fall into this group.)

“Locally Important Cities” have urban area populations of at least 5,000. (Note: 5,000 is the minimum population threshold to be considered “urban” by the model—the same threshold used by the U.S. Census Bureau.)

Cities receiving “A” ratings should be thought of as cities that nearly qualified for the next tier above, but were deficient in some important regard. For example, a city with a “2-A” rating can be thought of as an Almost Global City; and a city with a “3-A” rating can be thought of as an Almost Major City, etc.

Note that there is a very high bar for cities to be rated “Regional”, an even higher bar for cities to be rated “Major”, and an almost insurmountable bar for cities to be rated “Global”.

A-rated cities are the cities most likely to move into higher tiers in future ratings.

Cities receiving “B” ratings in a given tier are those that scored lower than cities receiving “A” ratings in the same tier.

Cities receiving “C” ratings in a given tier are those that scored lower than cities receiving “B” ratings—but still solidly qualify for their respective tiers.

C-rated are the cities most likely to move into lower tiers in future ratings.

To see how U.S. cities compare to other cities globally, click here.