Better understanding of the potential growth of urban areas at the national and global levels is important for exploring the linkages between urban systems, other human systems, and the environment. In this study, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Iowa State University developed urban area growth models for each country using the time‐series data set of global urban extents (1992–2013), and projected the future growth of urban areas under five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which are reference pathways depicting plausible alternative trends in the evolution of society and ecosystems through 2100. Global urban area is projected to increase by roughly 40–67% under the five scenarios by 2050 relative to the base year of 2013, and this trend would continue to a growth ratio of more than 200% by 2100. Although developing countries would remain leading contributors to the increase of global urban areas in the future, they may exhibit different temporal patterns, i.e., plateaued or monotonically increasing trends. This urban area data set is the first country‐level urban area projection consistent with the five SSPs, between 2013 and 2100. Several types of predictive global change studies can be built on this data set, e.g., urban sprawl simulation, multisector dynamics modeling, and investigating the effects of urban growth on air pollution and public health.