Nashville is a mid-large American city, the 21st most populous city in the United States at roughly 705,000 people in the city proper, and the 35th-largest metro area in the country at 2.15 million. By any reasonable standard, it’s a big city. But Nashville has an unusual quality: it functions somewhat smaller than it is, which creates persistent confusion about how to categorize it.
The Numbers
- City proper (Davidson County): ~705,000 (2024 estimate)
- Metro area: 2.15 million
- US city rank by population: 21st
- US metro rank: 35th
For comparison: Nashville’s city population is roughly the same as San Francisco (815,000) or Boston (680,000). The metro is slightly larger than Hartford, CT and slightly smaller than Salt Lake City, UT.
Nashville is also one of the largest US cities by land area, Davidson County covers roughly 504 square miles of land, making it comparable in footprint to cities that are three or four times larger in population. Los Angeles is only 503 square miles. This low-density spread is why Nashville feels different from its population rank suggests.
Why It Feels Smaller Than It Is
Nashville’s population is spread across a large geographic area with relatively low density. The urban core is concentrated, but significant portions of Davidson County are suburban or rural in character. Population density is roughly 1,402 people per square mile, compared to San Francisco’s 18,000+ per square mile.
This matters for daily experience. Nashville doesn’t have the physical density that makes a city feel “big.” There’s no extensive subway system, no true high-density neighborhoods outside the immediate downtown core, and the scale of Broadway, the tourist epicenter, is a few blocks long rather than miles. You can drive across the city in 30 minutes in non-peak hours.
The city also has a social scale that many people describe as “big city with small-town feel”, an expression that gets used to the point of cliché, yet it refers to something real. Six degrees of separation compresses to about two or three in Nashville’s professional, music, and creative communities. Running into people you know is common. The city is large enough to have major institutions and a real economy; it’s small enough that networks are tight.
What Nashville Has That a Smaller City Doesn’t
Nashville has three professional sports teams, a growing international airport (BNA), a world-class museum (Country Music Hall of Fame), legitimate fine dining, a healthcare industry of national significance, and corporate headquarters that draw talent from around the country. These are big-city attributes.
Nashville also has traffic problems, a significant convention industry, a downtown core with genuine high-rises, and the beginnings of a tech sector. These are things small cities don’t have.
The Accurate Description
Nashville is a large city by US standards that feels more manageable than its population rank implies. It’s too big to be called a small city, it just isn’t. But it hasn’t yet developed the full urban density, transit infrastructure, and physical scale of cities like Chicago, Dallas, or Atlanta. The right category is genuinely mid-to-large: a city that’s been growing fast enough that the infrastructure hasn’t fully caught up with the size.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau, incorporated cities by population, 2024 estimates
- Nashville metropolitan area, U.S. Census Bureau MSA data
- U.S. Census Bureau, population density data, 2020
- Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, Regional Economic Report 2024