Metairie ( MET-ər-ee) is a census-designated place (CDP) in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, United States, and is allowance of the New Orleans metropolitan area. With a population of 143,507 in 2020, Metairie is the largest community in Jefferson Parish and was (as of 2010) the fifth-largest CDP in the United States. It is an unincorporated area that (as of 2020) would have been Louisiana’s fourth-largest city at the back Shreveport if incorporated.

Métairie (French: [metɛʁi]) is the French term for a small tenant farm which paid the landlord later a share of the produce, a practice also called sharecropping (in French, métayage). In the 1760s many of the original French farmers were tenants; after the Civil War, the majority of the community’s inhabitants were sharecroppers until urbanization started in the 1910s.

In the 1720s French settlers became the first Europeans to decide Metairie in the area known subsequently as Tchoupitoulas and now as Metairie Ridge, a natural levee formed by an ancient branch of the Mississippi River, Bayou Metairie, which flowed through modern-day River Ridge, Metairie, Gentilly, and New Orleans East. It emptied into Mississippi Sound. The Acolapissa Native Americans used this ridge as a road; it is the oldest road in the New Orleans area. Paved in the 1920s, it is called Metairie Road. An electric streetcar was installed dispensation along Metairie Road in the late 1910s, opening the area to greater development.^{[citation needed]} Upscale housing tracts were build up off the road in the 1920s; this Place is now known as “Old Metairie”. The areas to the north and northwest of Metairie Road were not developed until after World War II.^{[citation needed]} The estate between Metairie Ridge and Lake Pontchartrain, which was cypress swamps and marshlands, was drained when the Wood Pump. With development of this new house for residences, Metairie’s population grew in the 1940s for that reason of cheaper land, lower taxes, and larger lots as compared to Orleans Parish.

The 1947 Fort Lauderdale hurricane, with winds of 125 mph (201 km/h), directly hit Metairie. Much of the community was below 6 feet (1.8 m) of water.