Metropolitan Boston population is 1,520,470.

It is the fourth most populous area in the U.S. after New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. According to the 1917 Handbook of New England, “This great concentrated population, equipped with the intensive transportation facilities of a huge metropolis, is what invariably astonishes the stranger who, with census figures in mind, expects to find Boston a city of the St. Louis, Cleveland or Baltimore type, rather than one comparing with Chicago and Philadelphia.”