Bangor population

61,011people · latest estimate

Photo: Geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By James Burfield, SEO consultant, Bath · Page updated 18 September 2026 · GeoNames · World Gazetteer 2005

Bangor has a population of 61,011, making it the largest place in Ards and North Down. In 2005 the World Gazetteer recorded 60,385, a rise of 1.0% since.

60,385

in 2005

+1.0%

since 2005

of 12 in Ards and North Down

The other populations of Bangor

The same name covers more than one area, and each has its own figure.

What you mean	Population	Source
The place itself The populated settlement, roughly the built-up core.	61,011	GeoNames
The place in 2005 The same settlement twenty years earlier.	60,385	World Gazetteer (2005)

Why these differ: which population figure is right? · compare with another place

The 2005 figure is from the World Gazetteer archive and may draw its boundary differently from the current source, so treat the change as indicative. Sources: method.

Year-by-year official estimates for the wider area: Ards and North Down population trends, 2001–2024.

Bangor is one of the UK's 76 official cities, ranked 54 of 76 by population.

Bangor in context

15 km

west to Newtownabbey, the nearest larger town

97,743

people live within 10 km

#200

largest of 6,358 UK places

Distances are straight-line from the settlement's recorded coordinates. The 10 km figure sums the recorded places within that radius, so it describes how built-up the surroundings are rather than people per square kilometre.

The population, measured on a real boundary

What you mean	Population	Source
Bangor settlement NISRA's settlement boundary: the built-up Bangor	64,122	Census 2021
Bangor (GeoNames record) the figure in this page's heading; boundary unstated	61,011	GeoNames

The census figure is NISRA's Census 2021 count of usual residents inside the settlement's development limit: a boundary drawn in 2014–15 holding 2021 people, so growth at the edges since then sits outside it. 27,859 households. Where the rows disagree, quote the census. Northern Ireland's other layers wait on data that is either licensed (postcodes) or published only at district level (crime), and those absences are deliberate.

Common questions

What is the population of Bangor?

The populated place itself holds 61,011 residents. The wider Ards and North Down council area recorded 165,415 in 2024. Each figure describes a different boundary and all are correct; the meanings table on this page says which is which, because a population without its boundary is not an answer.

Go deeper

Population since 2001

Ards and North Down, year by year from ONS estimates

Nearby in Ards and North Down

#	Place	Population
1	Newtownards	29,363
2	Holywood	13,109
3	Comber	9,190
4	Donaghadee	7,369

All 12 places in Ards and North Down →