Does more megapixals the camera have take up more memory from your sd card?

I was looking into buying a nikon d5100 which has 16.2 megapixals, but then I heard about the new d5200 which has around 24megapixels, well my question is if I get the one with more megapixals will it take up more memory on a sd card then the one with less megapixels?

Yes, all else being equal, the file size gets larger the higher the resolution the image is.

Yes. It makes a bigger file.

Yes, but indirectly. The photo will have more pixels, 24MP, which will take more bytes to store, which will use up you memory card quicker.

But not to fear. Memory cards are getting bigger and cheaper so it's not likely you will not have enough memory on your SD card. The ratio is about the same, so a photo of 16.2 MP that might take up 6 megabytes (MB) of storage will now take about 9 MB for a 24 MP photo. Which means you can get about 900 photos on an 8 GB card.

Of course it will. Why would you even be concerned about it? SDHC cards are the cheapest "accessory" in photography. We travel with 3 cameras and 12 cards, the biggest cards being 8gb class 10.

Everyone here is wrong so far.

megapixels only make the files larger if you are shooting in RAW format.

if you shoot jpegs, a 16MP file and a 24MP file could be exactly the same size. Why? The amount of compression the camera maker decides to use.

So do you shoot RAW or JPEG? If you shoot jpeg, the files are not that much larger.

With memory cards dirt cheap these days for the amount of GBs you get, and hard drives for your computer now are very cheap per GB, it's just not the issue that it might have been a few years ago.