| 1 | Shanghai | Shanghai Municipality | | China's largest municipal economy and its financial, shipping and trade hub; the Port of Shanghai has long led the world in container throughput, and services account for over 70 percent of local GDP | Full year 2024 |
| 2 | Beijing | Beijing Municipality | | Services make up more than 80 percent of local GDP, the highest share of any Chinese city, reflecting a dense cluster of state-owned and multinational headquarters | Full year 2024 |
| 3 | Shenzhen | Guangdong | | Home to China's largest electronics manufacturing base and its top exporting city for many consecutive years, all within fifty years of being founded as a city | Full year 2024 |
| 4 | Chongqing | Chongqing Municipality | | The largest municipality by area at about 82,400 sq km, built on autos and electronics, with laptop output long ranking among the highest in the world | Full year 2024 |
| 5 | Guangzhou | Guangdong | | Southern China's trade and exhibition centre, host of the Canton Fair, and one of the country's top automobile producing cities | Full year 2024 |
| 6 | Suzhou | Jiangsu | | The only ordinary prefecture-level city in the top six, out-producing provincial capitals such as Chengdu, Hangzhou and Wuhan, and home to county-level powerhouses including Kunshan and Zhangjiagang | Full year 2024 |
| 7 | Chengdu | Sichuan | | The largest economy in western China, where electronics and IT became the first industrial cluster to pass one trillion yuan in output | Full year 2024 |
| 8 | Hangzhou | Zhejiang | | Core digital-economy sectors contribute close to a quarter of local GDP, making it one of China's densest clusters of internet platform headquarters | Full year 2024 |
| 9 | Wuhan | Hubei | | Central China's biggest economy, anchored by a nationally leading optoelectronics cluster and one of the largest university student populations in the country | Full year 2024 |
| 10 | Nanjing | Jiangsu | | Jiangsu's capital and a national leader in software and information services; Jiangsu and Guangdong are the only two provinces with two cities in the top ten | Full year 2024 |
| 11 | Ningbo | Zhejiang | | Ningbo-Zhoushan has been the world's busiest port by cargo tonnage for years, and in 2024 the city's GDP overtook the municipality of Tianjin for the first time | Full year 2024 |
| 12 | Tianjin | Tianjin Municipality | | The smallest of the four municipalities by GDP, built on port logistics, petrochemicals and equipment manufacturing, and overtaken by Ningbo in 2024 | Full year 2024 |
| 13 | Qingdao | Shandong | | Shandong's largest economy, known for home appliances and the marine economy, and bigger than the provincial capital Jinan | Full year 2024 |
| 14 | Wuxi | Jiangsu | | Consistently among the highest GDP-per-capita cities in China, with integrated circuit and IoT industries that lead among prefecture-level cities | Full year 2024 |
| 15 | Changsha | Hunan | | Hunan's capital and China's largest construction machinery cluster, often called the country's engineering machinery capital | Full year 2024 |
| 16 | Zhengzhou | Henan | | Henan's capital and a national rail hub that also serves as one of the world's most important smartphone assembly bases | Full year 2024 |
| 17 | Fuzhou | Fujian | | Fujian's capital, which in recent years became the province's largest economy, led by textiles, chemical fibres and electronics | Full year 2024 |
| 18 | Jinan | Shandong | | Shandong's capital, which absorbed the neighbouring city of Laiwu in 2019 and has since narrowed the gap with Qingdao | Full year 2024 |
| 19 | Hefei | Anhui | | Anhui's capital, which built display panel, chip and electric vehicle clusters in parallel and is among the fastest risers on this list over the past decade | Full year 2024 |
| 20 | Xi'an | Shaanxi | | Shaanxi's capital and the central city of northwest China, strong in aerospace research and now a major electric vehicle production base | Full year 2024 |
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