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Urban habitats differ from adjacent natural habitats in terms of disturbance regimes, light, temperature, rainfall, habitat distribution and resource abundance. Meteorological differences advance and prolong the growing season in urban habitats compared to nearby rural areas. In turn, urban bird populations may potentially start singing earlier, and reproduce earlier and more frequently than rural populations. However, this prediction has previously only been tested with data from single species using single spatial replicates from rural and urban sites. Here we provide the first general (paired urban and rural populations of 54 bird species) and large-scale (a 3800 km long latitudinal gradient across Europe) empirical evidence for longer and earlier singing periods in urban compared to rural habitats. Effects of urbanization on start and duration of the singing period (as a proxy for the breeding season) were positively …