Note that this product is now a free download [33 MB]. The database will be updated about once per year, since the city data doesn't change that frequently. [license]

The database uses toponymic information, based on the Geographic Names Data Base, containing official standard names approved by the United States Board on Geographic Names and maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. More information is available at the Maps and Geodata link at www.nga.mil. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency name, initials, and seal are protected by 10 United States Code Section 445.

It also uses free population data © by Stefan Helders www.world-gazetteer.com. Visit his website to download the free population data. Our database combines Stefan's population data with the list of all cities in the world.

Another free cities database is available from GeoNames.

Product Features - MaxMind World Cities with Population

Includes the following fields: Country Code ASCII City Name City Name State/Region Population Latitude Longitude Timezone data is available through an external lookup Approximately 2,710,000 records. Database Fields Field Data Type Field Description Country Code char(2) ISO 3166 Country Code, ASCII City Name varchar(100) Name of city or town in ASCII encoding City Name varchar(255) Name of city or town in ISO-8859-1 encoding. A list of cities contained in GeoIP City is available. State/Region char(2) For US, ISO-3166-2 code for the state/province name. Outside of the US, FIPS 10-4 code Population unsigned int Population of city (available for over 33,000 major cities only) Latitude numeric (float) Latitude of city where IP is located Longitude numeric (float) Longitude of city where IP is located