The Belfast metropolitan area, also known as Greater Belfast, is a grouping of council areas which include commuter towns and overspill from Belfast, Northern Ireland, with a population of 671,559 in 2011 and 704,406 in 2021. The area combines the Belfast, Lisburn, Newtownabbey, North Down, Castlereagh and Carrickfergus districts from before the local government reorganization of 2014. This equates to 37.1% of Northern Ireland's population.

Overview

The area was first officially classified as a metropolitan area in the late 1990s when the British government began to prepare for a cohesive plan that would include the Belfast Region. Six local government districts – Belfast, Castlereagh, Carrickfergus, Lisburn, Newtownabbey and North Down, were identified as the key areas within the metropolitan area. The continuous built-up area centred on Belfast, which is contained within these six districts, is defined as the Belfast Metropolitan Urban Area. The Belfast metropolitan urban area had a population of 579,276 in 2001 and a population of 626,339 in 2021, or 89% of the total population of the metropolitan area. The area is made up of established towns, their overspill and the general conjoining of settlements as Belfast expands. Established towns include Carrickfergus, Bangor, Lisburn and Holywood. Many of these towns were established and important long before Belfast rose to prominence; Carrickfergus, for example, was the Norman capital of the northern part of Ireland until Edward Bruce's defeat in 1318. Bangor had been an important centre of Christianity and learning from its foundation in 555 AD. The recent reclassification of Lisburn as a city does not change its position within the metropolitan area. A Belfast Urban Area strategic development plan for Belfast and the surrounding area was adopted in 1990 to cover the period up to 2001. This plan was to be superseded by the Belfast Metropolitan Area Plan 2015, to cover the period up to 2035. However, enforcement of this plan was quashed by the Northern Ireland High Court in May 2017, and the Belfast Urban Area plan remains in effect. Currently the terms Belfast Metropolitan Area and Belfast Metropolitan Urban Area have no official use either in administration or statistical reporting.

Places in the conurbation

2021 Census

The demographics of the Belfast Metropolitan Urban Area from the 2021 census are as follows:

2001 Census

At the 2001 census, the demographic characteristics of the people living in Belfast metropolitan urban area (BMUA) were as follows:

Population maps

The following maps show religious and national identity distributions from the 2021 census. National Identity responses could include multiple identities. In the 2011 UK Census, the distributions of population, religion, national identity and proportion of immigrants within the Belfast metropolitan area, were as follows.