The study of Land Use Land Cover (LULC) changes and their patterns enhance our understanding of the causes and consequences of various natural and man caused phenomenon. The Capital City of Pakistan, Islamabad has expereinced high rate of urbnization and population increase in the last 3-4 decades. The main aim of our study was to provide compatible data on LULC change during the last 40 years for the functional city Islamabad, Pakistan. LULC statistics were extracted from Landsat Multi-spectral Scanner (MSS), Thematic Mapper (TM), Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and Operational Land Imager (OLI) images. For each of the target years (1979, 1989, 1999, 2009 and 2019) LULC information was obtained through a supervised classification algorithm. The study area was classified into five major landscape categories, namely built-up, agriculture, forest, water bodies and barren land. The results have indicated that the urban expansion has been increasing due to mass migration and uncontrolled urbanization in the city. The urban sprawl analysis revealed that built-up area and farmland has expanded by 41.7% and 5.20% during (1979-2019). On the other hand, the forest and water bodies declined from at 9.03% and 1.21% respectively. The land degradation has forced the planners to revise the original master plan of the city and including the agricultural sector in the housing area during 2019. This degradation of land has also led to increase in the temperature of the city.