Nepal's 753 Local Levels: Complete Directory of Municipalities and Rural Municipalities

Nepal's local levels (Nepali: स्थानीय तह, sthaniya taha) are the third tier of the federal state established by the Constitution of Nepal 2015, sitting beneath the federal government and the seven provinces. There are exactly 753 of them, and unlike provinces or districts they are full units of government in their own right: each has its own directly elected assembly, executive, chairperson or mayor, budget and law-making powers. They are the level of the Nepali state that citizens deal with most directly, handling local roads, drinking water, primary schooling, basic health posts, vital registration (births, deaths, marriages), agriculture and livestock extension, local taxation and disaster response.

The 753 units fall into two broad families — urban and rural. Urban local levels are graded into three classes: metropolitan cities (mahanagarpalika), sub-metropolitan cities (upa-mahanagarpalika) and ordinary municipalities (nagarpalika). Rural areas are governed by rural municipalities (gaunpalika), often translated simply as 'village municipality'. Despite the urban/rural distinction, all four types have identical constitutional powers; the classification reflects population, infrastructure and revenue rather than any difference in legal authority.

Each local level is itself subdivided into wards (Nepali: वडा), the smallest unit of government in Nepal. A local level has between 9 and 35 wards, and across all 753 units there are 6,743 wards in total. Every ward elects a five-member committee — a ward chairperson plus four ward members — under rules designed for inclusion: of the four members at least two must be women, and at least one of those women must be a Dalit.

This directory aims to list every one of Nepal's 753 local levels in a single browsable, searchable place, with a dedicated detail page for each palika. The directory can be filtered by province, by district and by type so that, for example, all 13 local levels of a given district or all 460 rural municipalities can be viewed together. Each entry carries the unit's English name, its Nepali name, its type (metropolitan / sub-metropolitan / municipality / rural municipality), the district and province it belongs to, the number of wards it contains, its headquarters and, where available, its area.

The data is assembled from a single verified dataset rather than scattered ad-hoc lists, so that the totals always reconcile to the official figures (6 + 11 + 276 + 460 = 753). The English and Nepali names of each local level are seeded from the per-district arrays already maintained on this site, and are enriched with type and ward count cross-checked against the Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration (MoFAGA) official local-level list and the National Statistics Office (NSO/CBS) census tables. Where a local level's name has changed or been spelled differently across sources, the form used in the official MoFAGA gazette is preferred.

A metropolitan city (mahanagarpalika) is the highest urban grade, reserved for Nepal's largest cities. Under the criteria attached to the Local Government Operation Act 2017, qualification requires a very large population (on the order of 500,000), substantial infrastructure and a high level of municipal revenue. Nepal has six metropolitan cities, spread across four provinces and including the national capital.

Kathmandu Metropolitan City, in Kathmandu district of Bagmati Province, is the capital and by far the largest. The other five are Pokhara (Kaski, Gandaki), Bharatpur (Chitwan, Bagmati), Lalitpur (Lalitpur, Bagmati), Birgunj (Parsa, Madhesh) and Biratnagar (Morang, Koshi). Bagmati Province alone contains three of the six.

A sub-metropolitan city (upa-mahanagarpalika) is the second urban grade, sitting between metropolitan cities and ordinary municipalities. Classification broadly requires a population of around 200,000 along with infrastructure and revenue thresholds set under the 2017 Act. Nepal has eleven sub-metropolitan cities, distributed across several provinces with a notable cluster in Lumbini and Madhesh provinces.

The eleven are Itahari and Dharan (both Sunsari, Koshi); Janakpur (Dhanusha), Kalaiya (Bara) and Jitpursimara (Bara), all in Madhesh; Hetauda (Makwanpur, Bagmati); Butwal (Rupandehi), Tulsipur and Ghorahi (both Dang) and Nepalganj (Banke), all in Lumbini; and Dhangadhi (Kailali, Sudurpashchim).

The remaining 736 units are ordinary municipalities (276) and rural municipalities (460), which together make up the bulk of the directory. A municipality (nagarpalika) is an urban local level whose population threshold varies by geography — broadly around 10,000 in the high mountains, larger in the hills, and up to 100,000 in the Kathmandu Valley — together with minimum revenue and basic urban services. Municipalities are the most numerous urban class and are found in every district of the country.

A rural municipality (gaunpalika) governs the remaining, more dispersed rural areas. At 460 units it is the single largest category of local level, accounting for over 60% of the total. Rural municipalities deliver the same constitutional services as their urban counterparts — local roads, water, schools, health posts and vital registration — but typically over larger, less densely settled territories. Two districts, Kathmandu and Bhaktapur, are fully urbanised and contain no rural municipality at all.

Whatever their class, all 753 local levels exercise the same constitutionally guaranteed competences: the Constitution of Nepal 2015 (Schedule 8) and the Local Government Operation Act 2017 grant each unit 22 exclusive powers and 15 powers held concurrently with the federal and provincial governments, covering local governance, basic services, local taxes, and the management of local infrastructure and natural resources.

Before federalism, Nepal's lowest tier of administration consisted of 3,915 Village Development Committees (VDCs) and a smaller number of municipalities, grouped under district development committees. The 2015 Constitution replaced this with a single, empowered local tier. To draw the new map, the government formed a Local Level Restructuring Commission (LLRC) under the chairmanship of Balananda Paudel, which merged the thousands of former VDCs and old municipalities into a much smaller number of larger units.

The commission's initial recommendation was 719 local levels. After objections — particularly from Madhesh-based parties seeking more units in the Tarai — the number was revised upward, and the final 753 local levels formally came into existence on 10 March 2017. The first elections to the new bodies were held later that year in three phases, the first local elections in Nepal in about two decades, completing the transition from appointed or vacant local bodies to a fully elected local government.

Since 2017, the 753 local levels have operated as the front line of the Nepali state. They are coordinated within their districts by District Coordination Committees (DCCs), which replaced the old district development committees but with considerably reduced powers, leaving the local levels themselves as the principal locus of grassroots governance and service delivery.