Who publishes the site
plusgrandevilledefrance.com is published by Les Pins Des Sables, a French simplified joint-stock company (SAS) registered in Antibes (RCS 983 041 658), based in Juan-les-Pins (Alpes-Maritimes). Publication director: Sébastien Pinchard. Full details are in the legal notice.
It is an independent website, not affiliated with the French government: the public bodies whose data it reuses do not publish it and do not endorse its content.
What the site does
The site covers the 34,875 communes of France, mainland and overseas. For each one it publishes a page with its official figures (population since 1876, area, housing, income, schools, health, climate, local finances, elections and more), and it ranks the communes for France as a whole, for each region and for each department. It also compares communes two by two. A section is shown only when official data exists for it: nothing is estimated or made up.
Where the data comes from
Every figure comes from a public producer: INSEE, IGN, the DGFiP (public finances), the Ministries of the Interior, Education, Health and Ecological Transition, Météo-France, La Poste, SNCF Gares & Connexions and others, 45 datasets in all. The data sources page lists each dataset with its producer, its licence and the date of its latest update by the producer.
Automatic updates
Every night, a program checks whether a producer has released a new version of its data. When it has, the program downloads it, checks it (number of communes, reference values, consistency with the previous version) and switches to it in one go; if a check fails, the previous version stays online. Rankings and pages are then recalculated.
Methodology
Official data only
The site publishes producers’ values as they are. Ranks, densities and gaps between communes are calculated by the site from those values. Values withheld by the producer (statistical or tax confidentiality) are shown as not published, never estimated.
Which population?
The population shown for each commune is INSEE’s total official population in force on January 1, 2026: the municipal population plus the people “counted separately” (students, boarding pupils or people living in an institution whose usual residence is elsewhere but who keep a residence in the commune). It is the reference population for applying laws and regulations. Many websites and search engines quote the municipal population, which is lower: Marseille, for example, has 892,391 inhabitants in total population and 886,040 in municipal population. Historical series since 1876 use the municipal population, the only one available over the whole period. Density is the total population divided by the official area (IGN).
How rankings are calculated
Communes are ranked on a single indicator, from the highest value to the lowest (or the reverse for “least” rankings). Communes with equal values share the same rank and the next rank is skipped (1, 2, 2, 4). Values that are not published, missing or outside the source’s scope are never ranked. Some indicators only rank communes above a population threshold (for example 5,000 inhabitants for recorded crime), stated on each ranking, because a few events are enough to swing a rate in a small commune. A ranking is published only if it covers at least ten communes. Paris, Lyon and Marseille are ranked as whole communes: their arrondissements are not communes.
Contact and corrections
To report an error or ask a question, write to contact@plusgrandevilledefrance.com, mentioning the page concerned.
How to cite
Please cite the page you use and the original producer, for example: Source: plusgrandevilledefrance.com, based on INSEE official population figures, https://plusgrandevilledefrance.com/en/ranking/density
.