Abstract: Urban agglomeration has increasingly become the important carrier of population agglomeration and urbanization development in China. With the proposed Yangtze Economic Belt strategy and New Urbanization Construction, development of urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of Yangtze River catches more and more attention. In order to explain the formation and evolution of current pattern of population and urbanization distribution in 2014, by using the 1990, 2000 and 2010 census data of Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi, we analyzed the distribution and its changes of population and urbanization in urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of Yangtze river since 1990, from the aspects of total population, population density and urbanization. Results showed that: 1) the total population in the middle reaches of Yangtze river has been growing continuously since 1990, with a pace of slowing down. The population is mainly concentrated in Wuhan, Changsha, and Nanchang. The spatial pattern of population distribution has shifted from a single core to a multicore spatial pattern. 2) Increase of population in towns mainly contributes to the increase of urban population. The area of high level of urbanization has shifted from distributing in the north of Yangtze River to distributing along the Yangtze River, BeijingKowloon and ZheGan Railway. And the multicore spatial pattern of urbanization has been formed. 3) The spatial pattern of urbanization and distribution of population has a consistency to a certain extent, which reflects the influence of population agglomeration on urbanization. Urbanization has more remarkable changes in spatial for influenced by development of economy, industry level and more other factors. Key words：population distribution; urbanization; spatial pattern; urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of Yangtze river