A small district on the road from Kohat toward Thall and Kurram · 528,902 people in 2023 · more women than men in the count
Hangu District is one of the 38 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with its headquarters at Hangu. It has 2 tehsils: Hangu and Tall. The 2023 census counted 528,902 people on 1,097 km², and 43.15% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hangu | Tehsil | 280,883 | 669 | 15.54% | 48.63% |
| Tall | Tehsil | 248,019 | 428 | 16.97% | 36.7% |
Hangu is easy to miss if you only study the famous valleys. It is a short district — about 1,097 square kilometres — squeezed between Kohat, Orakzai and the Kurram road. Thall (Tall) is the western town. That is where buses and trucks turn toward the agency-turned-district of Kurram. Hangu town is the headquarters. Doaba is the third name on the municipal list.
Bangash land is the old political description. Pashto is the speech of the bazaar. The last khanate stories still circulate in families; they are family history, not a census column.
2017: 518,811. 2023: 528,902. That is about one third of one percent a year. Most KP districts grew faster. Households: 61,148. Sex ratio in the 2023 write-up: about 97 men per 100 women. That is the opposite of Bannu or Dera, where the male count runs ahead. Literacy 43.15 percent overall — 66.04 percent for men, 22.02 percent for women. Under-tens: about 152,500, or 29 percent of the surveyed population.
Municipal rows for 2023: Hangu council about 43,642 (down from about 48,800 in 2017). Thall council about 30,977 (also slightly down). Doaba town council about 11,108 (a sharp drop from the 2017 town figure near 21,000 — treat that as a definition change until PBS prints a note, not as a vanished town).
The printed 2023 tehsil table that is easy to check has two full rows:
Doaba is listed as a tehsil on some district pages but the public 2023 number row for it is still incomplete in the same tables. The town is named here, but no third full tehsil population is given until the Bureau prints it.
A local village list talks of about 51 rural localities, with two dozen of them above 5,000 people in the previous census. That is a scale note: Hangu is not 300 unnamed hamlets, and it is not one city either.
Kohat is the larger neighbour for specialist care and many college seats. Hangu keeps government colleges and a DHQ. THQ-style cover at Thall matters because that town is the gate, not a suburb of Hangu bazaar. Female literacy at 22 percent is the line that belongs next to any college paragraph.
Assembly arithmetic after 2023 has been discussed as a Hangu-cum-Orakzai national seat. That is delimitation, not geography.
Sources: PBS 2023; tehsil rows for Hangu and Tall; municipal council series for Hangu, Thall and Doaba. September 2026.
Hangu District has 2 tehsils: Hangu and Tall.
The 2023 census counted 528,902 people in Hangu District, up from 518,811 in 2017 (annual growth 0.32%). 16.21% of the population lived in urban areas.
Hangu District covers 1,097 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 482.13 people per km².
The 2023 census lists 3 urban localities in Hangu District: Hangu (43,642, municipal committee), Tall (30,977, municipal committee) and Doaba (11,108, town committee).
43.15% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 66.04%, female 22.02%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Pashto (99.59% of the 525,623 people in the mother-tongue table).
Hangu District is in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Its headquarters is Hangu.