30 series and
1,319 data points,
most of them running back to 1960. Open any chart to read it year by
year, with its lowest and highest points named.
Most of this is Kenya, not Nairobi
Very little economic data is published for Nairobi alone. Everything marked Kenya is national and is labelled that way on purpose.
Nobody publishes an inflation series, a school enrolment series or
sixty years of GDP for Nairobi on its own, so this page does not
pretend to. You can filter to the Nairobi figures alone, of which
there are few.
What there is for Nairobi
Not much, and it is worth being plain about why. The census runs once a
decade, and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics has published the
size of each county's economy only since 2019. So the Nairobi record is
six population counts on today's boundary, what the
latest census found about its homes, the county's area, and five years
of its output.
Nairobi at every census
Census
People
Per km²
Share of Kenya
1969
509,286
722
4.7%
1979
827,775
1,174
5.4%
1989
1,324,570
1,879
6.2%
1999
2,143,254
3,040
7.5%
2009
3,138,369
4,452
8.1%
2019
4,397,073
6,237
9.2%
8.6 times more people in
2019 than in 1969, on the
county's 705 km².
The city's boundary was extended to about today's in 1963, so earlier
counts - for a city a seventh the size - are left out rather than
shown as growth. The share divides each count by Kenya's count at the
same census.
How Nairobi lived at the 2019 census
The 2019 census is Kenya's latest — the next is due around 2029 —
and it counted more than people. Nairobi's
1,506,888 households:
People per household
2.9
Renting their home
90.6%
Lit by mains electricity
96.5%
Water piped to the home or plot
51.1%
Water from vendors
15.4%
On the main sewer
54.3%
Cooking with gas or electricity
69.5%
Cooking with paraffin
26.5%
People aged 3+ using the internet
52.4%
People aged 3+ using a computer
28.0%
One census, so these are a picture of 2019 rather than a series. Every
figure is also on the map, sub-county
by sub-county. From the census's Volumes II and IV as tabulated by
census.ke (CC BY).
Nairobi's share of the economy
The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, Gross County Product 2024 puts Nairobi City at
27.5% of Kenya's economy, on average,
from 2019 to 2023. The next largest county,
Kiambu, made 5.6%. Nairobi's economy grew by
6.1% a year over those five years, against
4.6% for Kenya. It made
36.9% of the country's manufacturing
and 37.4% of its services.
Year
Output per person in Nairobi
2019
KSh 591,475
2020
KSh 594,095
2021
KSh 653,704
2022
KSh 735,768
2023
KSh 802,344
In 2023 that was
2.7 times
Kenya's KSh 293,229. These are
shillings of each year, not adjusted for inflation, and the share and
growth are five-year averages as KNBS reports them — stored that
way rather than stretched into series.
— The report
Every series, and what it covers
First value, last value, and how many observations there are. The
scope is the important part.
Nairobi itself (2)
Series
Unit
First
Latest
Points
Source
People in Nairobi
people
509,286 1969
4.4m 2019
6
Kenya census counts, 1969 to 2019 (KNBS and its predecessors)
Output per person in Nairobi
KSh
KSh 591,475 2019
KSh 802,344 2023
5
KNBS, Gross County Product 2024, Annexe IV (current prices)
Derived from two sourced series (2)
Series
Unit
First
Latest
Points
Source
People per square kilometre in Nairobi
per km²
722.4 1969
6,237 2019
6
Census counts divided by the county's 705 km²
Share of all Kenyans living in Nairobi
%
4.7% 1969
9.2% 2019
6
Census counts for Nairobi over census counts for Kenya
Fetched on 2026-10-15. Nothing here is modelled,
interpolated or forecast: where a series is sparse it stays sparse, and
the charts draw the observations rather than joining across the gaps.