how big is melbourne

Melbourne is a very large, sprawling city: Greater Melbourne covers about 9,992 square kilometres (around 3,858 square miles) and has a population of roughly 5.4–5.5 million people as of 2026 , making it Australia’s second-largest city after Sydney.

Quick Scoop: How big is Melbourne?

Melbourne isn’t just a compact downtown with a few suburbs tacked on – it’s a wide urban blanket stretching around Port Phillip Bay and well inland.

By land area

• Greater Melbourne (the metro area most people mean)
  • Area: about 9,992–9,993 km².

* That’s larger in land area than many major global cities, and very spread out.

• City of Melbourne (the central municipality only)
  • Area: about 36–38 km².

* This is basically the CBD and immediate inner precincts, not the whole city people think of.

Think of it like this: the “Melbourne” you imagine is almost all Greater Melbourne , not just the tiny official City of Melbourne council area.

By population

• Greater Melbourne population in 2026: about 5.46 million people, and still growing at around 1–1.5% per year.

• That’s roughly three‑quarters of the entire state of Victoria’s population concentrated in one metro area.

So when you ask “how big is Melbourne?”, in everyday terms it’s:

A metro of around 5.5 million people sprawled over nearly 10,000 km².

Extra context: how it feels on the ground

• It’s a classic car‑dependent, low‑to‑medium density city: lots of suburbs, detached houses, and long commutes.

• The central city is comparatively small and dense, but the suburbs spread far north, west and southeast, which is why the total area number is so big.

If you tell someone you live “in Melbourne”, you might actually be 40–50 km from the CBD and still very much inside the metropolitan area.

Mini FAQ

1. Is Melbourne bigger than Sydney?
   • By population, Sydney is still slightly larger overall, but Melbourne is very close and sometimes projected to overtake it if growth trends continue.

2. Why do I see different area numbers?
   • Because people may mean:
     • City of Melbourne (≈36–38 km²), or
     • Greater Melbourne / metropolitan area (≈9,992–9,993 km²).

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.