Division seat · code 040 · Montgomery until 1966
Sahiwal District is one of the 41 districts of Punjab, with its headquarters at Sahiwal. It has 2 tehsils: Chichawatni and Sahiwal. The 2023 census counted 2,881,811 people on 3,201 km², and 64.77% of residents aged 10 and over were literate.
| Name | Type | Population | Area (km²) | Urban | Literacy (10+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chichawatni | Tehsil | 1,155,978 | 1,591 | 9.71% | 65.25% |
| Sahiwal | Tehsil | 1,725,833 | 1,610 | 37.4% | 64.44% |
Sahiwal is what remains after a district has given birth. Old Montgomery stretched across what are now Okara, Pakpattan and this file. The children took the potato and the shrine. What stayed was a railway town, a red-brick ruin older than any saint on this bar, and a cow the world already knows by the district’s name.
The 2023 census counted 2,881,811 people in 446,606 households on 3,201 km². Urban 757,631. Literacy 64.77 percent — 71.06 among men, 58.29 among women. Punjabi almost the whole sheet. Phone 040.
Sahiwal tehsil — 1,725,833 people, literacy 64.44 percent. Chichawatni — 1,155,978 people, literacy 65.25 percent.
The Indus city at Harappa sits in this district. Baked brick, a drain, a granary plan. School buses treat it as a Sunday. It is not a Sunday. The ruin did not change its name when the town did.
Gugera was the old headquarters. In the 1860s a new railway town took Sir Robert Montgomery’s name. In 1966 Pakistan gave the town and district back the word Sahiwal. Okara left in 1982. Pakpattan left later. Canal squares on the Lower Bari Doab made the fields. Partition emptied Hindu and Sikh rooms and filled them from the other side of the line.
Sahiwal cattle — tick-hard, heat-hard, a dairy zebu the tropical world borrowed — are why a foreign veterinarian already knows this place. Cotton, wheat and cane pay the rest of the year. Chichawatni’s plantation is the green interruption.
Abdus Salam and Majeed Amjad are not on this roll; careful lists place both in Jhang. This district’s fame is a breed, a brick, and a name recovered.
Census 2023. Rename from the 1966 notification. Harappa from the published record.
The 7th Population and Housing Census (2023) by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) counted 2,881,811 people in Sahiwal District — 1,460,748 males and 1,420,910 females (sex ratio 102.80 males per 100 females). The 2017 census had counted 2,513,011, so the district gained 368,800 people in six years (difference calculated from the two PBS totals), an average annual growth rate of 2.31%. The district covers 3,201 km², giving a density of 900.28 people per km²; 26.29% of residents live in urban areas and the average household has 6.4 members.
| Tehsil / area | 2017 | 2023 | Annual growth % | Area km² | Density /km² | Sex ratio | Household size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chichawatni Tehsil | 1,024,180 | 1,155,978 | 2.04 | 1,591 | 726.57 | 101.61 | 6.5 |
| Sahiwal Tehsil | 1,488,831 | 1,725,833 | 2.50 | 1,610 | 1071.95 | 103.61 | 6.3 |
PBS reports a literacy rate (age 10+) of 64.77% for Sahiwal District: 71.06% for males and 58.29% for females, 78.60% in urban areas against 59.69% in rural areas. Of 2,105,939 residents aged 10 and over, 1,364,032 were literate. The census also counted 209,761 children aged 5–16 who were out of school (96,368 boys and 113,382 girls).
| Tehsil / area | Literacy % | Male % | Female % | Urban % | Rural % | Out-of-school (5–16) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chichawatni Tehsil | 65.25 | 71.77 | 58.61 | 84.61 | 63.05 | 83,415 |
| Sahiwal Tehsil | 64.44 | 70.57 | 58.07 | 77.50 | 56.37 | 126,346 |
PBS Table 2 lists 3 urban localities in the district (MC = municipal committee, TC = town committee):
Source: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Census 2023 — Table 1, Table 2, Table 12. Figures checked against the PBS tables on 2026-10-07.
Sahiwal District has 2 tehsils: Chichawatni and Sahiwal.
The 2023 census counted 2,881,811 people in Sahiwal District, up from 2,513,011 in 2017 (annual growth 2.31%). 26.29% of the population lived in urban areas.
Sahiwal District covers 3,201 km² according to the 2023 census, a density of 900.28 people per km².
64.77% of people aged 10 and over were literate in the 2023 census (male 71.06%, female 58.29%).
The most common mother tongue in the 2023 census was Punjabi (96.95% of the 2,878,122 people in the mother-tongue table), followed by Urdu (2.28%).
Sahiwal District is in Punjab. Its headquarters is Sahiwal.
Montgomery. The city was founded in 1865, named after Sir Robert Montgomery, and renamed Sahiwal in 1969. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)