Both for environmental and aesthetic purposes, urban street trees have significant importance. In most of the developed cities, this type of plantation is an integral part of landscape planning. Nevertheless, this issue is poorly considered in the cities of developing countries. Consequently, we observe a scarcity of urban street trees. Considering this scenario, we explored the state of urban street tree planting in Sylhet City, which is a growing urban centre in Bangladesh. We assessed the density, diversity, composition and distribution of street trees in the city using different diversity computation indices (e.g. relative abundances, dominance, importance and richness, evenness and diversity) in main and link roads. We also measured the growth pattern of the trees in the study area. It was found that out of 486 studied transects in both main and link roads, 404 had no trees. Sweitenia mahagoni was the dominant species in both road categories. The Mann Whitney U test results suggest that there was no significant difference in tree density and size attributes between the road categories. From these assessments, we concluded that the diversity and distribution of street trees in the study area was very limited. Moreover, there was no scientific arboricultural consideration in species selection to increase street tree planting for the city. We conclude that only proper management and objective-specific endeavor can change the prevailing scenario of the study area.