Non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) have a significant impact on air quality in urban areas. Detecting NMVOCs emission with its proxy HCHO on urban scales from space, however, has been limited by the lack of discernible enhancement. Here we show clear urban HCHO plumes from 16 cities over the globe by rotating TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument HCHO pixels according to wind directions. We fit the downwind structure of the plumes with the exponentially modified Gaussian approach to quantify urban HCHO effective production rates between 7.0 and 88.5 mol s−1. Our results are in line with total NMVOC emissions from the EDGAR inventory (r = 0.76). Our work offers a new measure of total NMVOC emissions from urban areas and highlights the potential of satellite HCHO data to provide new information for monitoring urban air quality.