According to statistics, there are 87 cities, 30 towns and 6545 villages in Kazakhstan. As of October 2018, they are home to more than 18.3 million people. Their declining or rapidly increasing population is not the case of individual localities, but is an expression of general trends in cities, depending on their size.

The current distribution of the population of Kazakhstan shows that 21.4% are concentrated in three cities with millions of inhabitants, which is 6.4 percentage points more than at the end of 2004. The share of other localities with a population of more than 10 thousand inhabitants has not changed: 6 cities with 300-500 thousand inhabitants – 12.4% of the population of Kazakhstan; 12 cities with 100-300 thousand people – 12.4%; 8 cities with 50-100 thousand people – 3.0%; 81 localities with 10-50 thousand people – 11.8%. At the same time, while in 2004 46.3 per cent of the population lived in settlements with the size of less than 10,000 people, in 2018 their share decreased by 7.2 percentage points.

In terms of the aggregate annual population growth rate, cities with a population above 1 million people are significantly ahead of the country average, 4.0% versus 1.4%, respectively. Population growth in cities of less than 50 thousand people remains at the level of 0.6% (10 – 50 thousand people) and 0.2% (less than 10 thousand people).

As a result, several conclusions can be drawn:

1. Small settlements, despite the large share of the population (39.1% of the population), are rapidly giving way to larger cities, which are more attractive due to wide access to economic opportunities and high quality of life. 
2. Large cities should take into account outperforming growth rates and create appropriate conditions for new residents. 
3. Medium cities need to find their momentum to create an attractive environment to retain their residents and attract new ones from neighboring communities.