In Serra da Saudade, a small town in the state of Minas Gerais, everybody knows everybody by name. A 2023 report by Folha de S.Paulo found the town had no gas station and no hotel, and that the local priest knew each churchgoer personally. Under the new estimate released on Friday (28) by IBGE, Brazil's national statistics institute, the town has 857 residents, the smallest population in the country. Some 500 km away, São Paulo sits at the other extreme. The state capital has 11.9 million inhabitants and remains Brazil's most populous city.

Overall, Brazil had 214.2 million inhabitants on July 1, 2026, the reference date of the estimates published in the official gazette. Growth was 0.37% compared with 2025, when the country had 213.4 million people. That is slightly slower than the previous year's 0.39%, and IBGE itself projects that the population will grow more and more slowly in the coming decades.

The 15 cities with more than 1 million people

Brazil has 15 municipalities with more than 1 million inhabitants, counting the federal capital Brasília. After São Paulo (11,911,337 residents, according to Estadão), the list continues with Rio de Janeiro (6,731,133), Brasília (3,009,996), Fortaleza (2,582,360) and Salvador (2,559,945). Guarulhos (1,351,284) and Campinas (1,189,761), both in São Paulo state, are the only non-capital cities in the group. Together, the 15 municipalities concentrate about 20% of Brazil's population: 1 in every 5 Brazilians lives in one of them, a share Folha puts at 42.9 million people.

Among state capitals, the picture is one of contrasts. Boa Vista (501,000), near the Venezuelan border, grew the most, 3.19% in one year, driven by Venezuelan migration, a trend IBGE had already flagged last year. At the other end, Salvador posted the biggest decline (-0.17%), followed by Natal (-0.13%), Belém (-0.08%) and Belo Horizonte (-0.02%). Palmas (333,200), Vitória (343,900) and Rio Branco (390,100) are the only capitals with fewer than 400,000 residents.

By state, São Paulo holds 21.6% of the population (46.1 million), followed by Minas Gerais (21.5 million) and Rio de Janeiro (17.2 million). The Southeast remains the most populous region, with 89 million people (41.6% of the total), while the Center-West is the smallest, with 17.4 million (8.1%), according to Estadão. At the bottom of the table, 2,467 municipalities have fewer than 10,000 inhabitants: they make up 44.3% of Brazil's cities but only 6% of its population. The 54 smallest add up to 78,823 residents, a crowd that would fit entirely inside Rio's Maracanã stadium, as Folha noted.

Your city's number is not just trivia. It affects the city hall's budget:

• The estimates have a reference date of July 1, 2026 and were published in the official gazette on Friday (28).
• They cover Brazil's 5,571 municipalities, plus Brasília and the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.
• The Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) uses the figures to calculate the distribution of the FPM and FPE, the federal transfer funds that finance municipal and state services.
• IBGE updates the estimates every year, based on the 2022 Census and other sources.

IBGE, which is responsible for the calculations, revised Brazil's population projections for 2000 to 2070 in August 2024 and now details the figures by municipality every year. The series shows a country that is still growing, only at an ever slower pace, with the population concentrated in large cities and a few outliers, like Boa Vista, expanding well above the national average.