Almaty and Astana rank among Top 300 cities worldwide

Kazakhstan’s cities Almaty and Astana have entered the Global Cities Index 2026 top 300, El.kz reports.

Almaty and Astana are the leading cities in Central Asia, according to the ranking of the world’s leading cities.

Almaty ranked 265th, while Astana ranked 281st among 1,000 cities worldwide. Kazakhstan’s two largest cities ranked highest among Central Asian cities and placed ahead of many major cities across the post-Soviet space.

The cities ranked below Kazakhstan’s major urban centres include Tbilisi (287th), Kyiv (304th), Moscow (313th), Baku (323rd), St Petersburg (454th), and Bishkek (461st).

Almaty and Astana performed particularly strongly in the Human Capital category. Almaty ranked 66th globally, while Astana ranked 98th. Both cities ranked ahead of a number of major world capitals, including Ankara, Warsaw, Prague, Tallinn, and Moscow.

In other words, both of Kazakhstan’s largest cities have entered the global top 100 in one of the key indicators of modern urban development.

Human capital refers to the potential of the people who live, study, and work in a city, including their educational attainment, availability of skilled professionals, workforce quality, and the city’s capacity to attract and develop talent.

It is precisely in this category that Kazakhstan’s cities demonstrate particularly strong positions.

This indicates that the principal resource underpinning the development of the two cities is not limited to infrastructure, investment, or the scale of their economies, but increasingly centres on people and talent.

In terms of the Economics category, Astana ranks ahead of Almaty: the capital is 264th, while Almaty is 288th.

In addition to economic performance and human capital, the index takes into account quality of life, environmental conditions, and governance.

For the second consecutive year, the top three cities in the global ranking are New York, London, and Paris.

For Kazakhstan, however, the key outcome of the ranking is that Almaty and Astana have already placed within the top third of 1,000 cities worldwide, rank as the leading cities in Central Asia and among CIS countries, and demonstrate particularly strong performance in human capital.