Biggest Cities in Nevada

Nevada's population is heavily concentrated in two metro areas — Las Vegas and Reno — with smaller cities scattered across the vast rural interior.

Las Vegas — 660,000 (metro: 2.3 million)
Nevada's largest city and one of the fastest-growing large cities in the US over the past 40 years. Las Vegas grew from 8,000 people in 1940 to 660,000 in the city proper today. The metro area — Clark County — has 2.3 million people. Las Vegas is fundamentally a 20th-century creation: the gambling legalization in 1931, the construction of Hoover Dam (which provided electricity and water), and the post-WWII resort development phase built the modern city. The Las Vegas Strip is technically in unincorporated Paradise; the city of Las Vegas proper is downtown and to the north.

Henderson — 330,000
Nevada's second-largest city — a Las Vegas suburb that has become a substantial city in its own right, with a major industrial base (chemical plants, gaming supply manufacturing), a significant professional community, and the Green Valley master-planned development (one of the most influential master-planned communities in the US).

Reno — 270,000 (metro: 480,000)
The "Biggest Little City in the World" — the Nevada city that predates Las Vegas in gambling history (the Cal Neva resort opened 1927). Reno is reinventing itself as a tech hub: Tesla's Gigafactory, Apple's and Switch's data centers, and a significant logistics industry (driven by no sales tax on business inventory) have diversified the economy dramatically. The Truckee River runs through downtown; the surrounding Sierra Nevada offers world-class outdoor recreation.

North Las Vegas — 270,000
A separate city from Las Vegas proper, North Las Vegas is more working-class and industrial than Henderson or Summerlin. The Nevada Motor Speedway is here; significant logistics warehousing operations have located here for freeway access.

Sparks — 110,000
Immediately east of Reno along I-80, Sparks has become the logistics and manufacturing hub of the Reno-Sparks metro. Tesla's Gigafactory 1 is located in Storey County between Sparks and the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center — one of the largest industrial parks in the world.