Measuring city size is a tricky endeavor. Municipal borders are pretty arbitrary and so not a great way to decide what the real size of the urbanized area is. The OECD has a methodology they call "functional urban areas"[1] that starts by identifying linked high density clusters and then refining from there.

Using their methodology the order is: LA, NYC, Chicago, SF, Houston, DC, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, and Phoenix.[2]

[1] https://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/Definition-of-Funct...

[2] https://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/functional-urban-ar...

The wikpedia list of Primary Statistical Areas is pretty useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_primary_statistical_ar...

Even those are way too large to represent "city areas" (i.e. metropolitan areas). A more reasonable comparison may be to use their subdivisions, MSA's [0], which can help overcome issues with city boundaries but they too are of course a bit arbitrary and misleading but can also give a better showing of size [1]. I've seen these used in many statistical scenarios concerning population centers.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...

Tricky indeed, esp. in a world where Dallas ends up behind Miami and Atlanta, the likely fault of Dallas is that it has a quasi twin city called Ft.Worth.

Yeah, I always thought Dallas metro (including Ft. Worth) was bigger than Houston metro.

> Honorable mention: San Francisco is at 13th

SF is artificially small due to how the line was drawn. Even the Census Region is not really correct since it considers SF and SJ as different zones, which artificially pumps up SJ's significance.

In reality "SF"-the-region includes Silicon Valley and the East Bay, and includes the non-agricultural (basically northern part) of San Jose as a suburb.

Is it San Francisco or is it the San Jose-Oakland Metroplex?

I kind of expect people will say it is San Francisco and speculate that the other is closer to the truth.

yeah my family always says i live in sf when i live in the south bay....

There are so many different municipalities and enclaves that only people from that area know/care the difference between Redwood City and Palo Alto. To the rest of the country it's just SF or the Bay Area.

To get a better sense of what is actually the top list, we should be sorting by metro area.

Agreed. A city proper is definitely not an isolated social and economic "unit"; therefore limiting comparisons to it will not give you the information you really want to make decisions.

I agree, but sometimes 'metro area' is a bizarre distinction.

NYC's Metropolitan Division includes Ocean County (Jersey shore) but not Essex County (which includes Newark and all of the PATH trains).

The Metropolitan Statistical Area includes Pike County (not accessible by commuter rail from NYC) but not New Haven or Fairfield (which are).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

Nah! These rankings are very very deceptive.

These rankings are based on political borders of the cities and not the commonly perceived notions of what is a city. Honestly for me entire SF to San Jose belt must be considered as one single city to compare it with something like L.A. That is just me saying though. I might be compeltely off on this because I have never been to NY, Chi, Phili, etc.

No, I think you have it right. I have lived in NYC and now live in SF, and a sensible comparison would be Manhattan to San Francisco, or the 5 Boroughs, northern Jersey and a chuck of CT to roughly San Jose up to SF. We can argue about including Marin.

(I generally look at urban regions that are larger entities than official borders by transit. If there are large daily people flows from area A to B, A and B are part of that region, no matter what the tax borders say.)