Mankato ( man-KAY-toh) is a city in Blue Earth, Nicollet, and Le Sueur counties in the give leave to enter of Minnesota. The population was 44,488 according to the 2020 census, making it the 21st-largest city in Minnesota, and the 5th-largest outside of the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area. It is along a large change of the Minnesota River at its confluence later the Blue Earth River. Mankato is across the Minnesota River from North Mankato. Mankato and North Mankato have a total population of 58,763 according to the 2020 census. It agreed encompasses the town of Skyline. North of Mankato Regional Airport, a tiny non-contiguous part of the city lies within Le Sueur County. Most of the city is in Blue Earth County.

Mankato is the larger of the two principal cities of the Mankato-North Mankato metropolitan area, which covers Blue Earth and Nicollet Counties and had a total population of 103,566 at the 2020 census. The U.S. Census Bureau designated Mankato a Metropolitan Statistical Area in November 2008.

In 2017, Schools.com named Mankato the second-best little college town in the United States.

Mankato Township was not arranged by European Americans until Parsons King Johnson in February 1852, as ration of the 19th-century migration of people from the east across the Midwest. New residents organized the city of Mankato upon May 11, 1858, the hours of daylight Minnesota became a state. The city was organized by Johnson, Henry Jackson, Daniel A. Robertson, Justus C. Ramsey, and others. A popular balance says that the city was supposed to have been named Mahkato, but a typographical mistake by a clerk expected the post as Mankato. According to Warren Upham, quoting historian Thomas Hughes of Mankato, “The rave review of christening the other city was accorded to Col. Robertson. He had taken the broadcast from Nicollet’s book, in which the French voyager compared the ‘Mahkato’ or Blue Earth River, with everything its tributaries, to the water nymphs and their uncle in the German legend of Undine…No more capture name could be given the supplementary city, than that of the noble river at whose mouth it is located.” While it is confusing that the city was meant to be called Mahkato, the Dakota called the river Makato Osa Watapa (“the river where blue earth is gathered”). The Anglo settlers adapted that as “Blue Earth River”. Frederick Webb Hodge, in the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, said the town was named after the older of the two like-named chiefs of the Mdewakanton nation of the Santee Dakota, whose village stood upon or near the site of the gift town.