United States Map and All State Maps with Counties and Population

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. States colours the fifty states and the District of Columbia so that no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities sizes the main metropolitan areas, Rivers draws the major named rivers, Satellite swaps the flat colours for real imagery of the country, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing.

Click any state, or any row in the table, and its figures appear in the Selection panel: population, land area, density, capital and county count. Where a state has its own detailed map on this site, the table links straight through to it.

Switch between metric and imperial with the Units control. Everything on the page follows it, including the downloads.

Every state map on one page

This page is the front door to a map of every state. Click a state on the map above and a card appears with its population and a link straight through to its own map, broken down by county, parish, borough or planning region. The map below does the same thing as a plain index: click any state to open it.

All fifty states are live, covering 3,144 counties and county equivalents in total. The District of Columbia is the one exception, since it is a single county equivalent and a county map of it would simply redraw the same outline.

States outlined in teal have their own map. Click one to open it. Hover any state for its capital and population. The rest are being added.

The country in four regions

Northeast

The smallest region by area and the most densely settled. Nine states, none of them large, holding a seventh of the country on a fraction of its land.

Midwest

Twelve states across the plains and the Great Lakes. It carries more counties than the Northeast and the West combined, a legacy of survey era land division.

South

The largest region by population and by county count. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia stretching from Delaware to Texas.

West

The largest region by area and the emptiest. Alaska alone accounts for more land than the entire Midwest.

Where the data comes from

Boundaries and land areas come from the United States Census Bureau, through the TIGERweb service. That is the same geography the Bureau uses for its own published tables, so the outlines here match the areas quoted beside them rather than coming from a different vintage.

Populations are the 2020 Census counts. That matters more than it sounds. Population figures for states float around the internet in several vintages at once, and mixing them is easy to do without noticing. The fifty states here sum to 330,759,736 and adding the District of Columbia gives 331,449,281, which is the published national figure. If a set of state populations does not add up to that, it is carrying more than one census year.

City positions and river courses come from Natural Earth, which is public domain. City sizes are metropolitan populations rather than city limits, which is why New York shows as roughly nineteen million rather than the eight and a half million inside the city boundary.

Why Alaska and Hawaii are drawn as insets

Almost every map of the United States puts Alaska and Hawaii in boxes below the mainland, and it is worth saying why, because the honest alternative looks terrible.

The forty eight contiguous states span about 58 degrees of longitude. Add Hawaii and that becomes 94 degrees. Add the Aleutian Islands, which run west past the 180th meridian, and the country wraps almost all the way around the globe. Drawn in true position, the mainland would shrink to a fraction of the frame and most of the map would be empty ocean.

The Aleutians cause a second problem that is invisible until it bites. Longitude runs from minus 180 to plus 180, and the chain crosses that line, so the western tip of Alaska is recorded at plus 179 while the rest of the state sits near minus 150. Software that simply takes the smallest and largest longitude concludes that Alaska is 359 degrees wide. On this map the positive longitudes are shifted into their negative continuation before anything is drawn, which turns Alaska back into a single shape 58 degrees across, almost exactly the width of the mainland.

Hawaii has a quieter version of the same issue. The state officially reaches out to Kure Atoll, about 2,400 kilometres beyond Honolulu, so the boundary file covers a huge stretch of open Pacific for a handful of tiny islands. The inset here shows the eight main islands, which is what people mean by Hawaii on a map of this kind.

Each of the three panels gets its own Lambert conformal conic projection, fitted to what it contains. That keeps each one honest in shape. It also means the insets are not at the same scale as the mainland, which is noted on the map itself. Alaska is drawn at roughly two fifths of mainland scale. At true scale it would be wider than the lower forty eight.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat state colours with real imagery. It comes from NASA, specifically the Blue Marble shaded relief and bathymetry layer served through Global Imagery Browse Services. It is a cloud free composite rather than a single day, so the whole country is visible at once.

The imagery arrives as a plain latitude and longitude grid, while this map is drawn in Lambert conformal conic. Laying one straight over the other would leave the coastline sliding away from the state boundaries. So every pixel is converted back to a latitude and longitude and the matching pixel is read from the source image, which puts both into the same projection. Because there are three panels, this happens three times, once each for the mainland, Alaska and Hawaii. Alaska gets Arctic imagery fitted to an Arctic projection rather than a stretched piece of a mainland request.

What you can read at this scale is the shape of the country rather than any detail in it: the arid southwest in tan, the forested east in dark green, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada as ridges, the Mississippi valley, the Great Lakes. Roughly five hundred metres per pixel, so terrain and vegetation, not buildings.

The imagery is public domain. NASA asks to be credited rather than paid, and the credit is drawn onto the map itself so it travels with the image when you download it. That is also why this is NASA imagery rather than the sharper commercial layers on the big mapping sites. Those are licensed from private operators and cannot be redistributed through a download button.

A check you can repeat on paper

Take Texas.

The Census Bureau gives it 29,145,505 people and 676,660 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

29,145,505 divided by 676,660 equals 43.1 people per square kilometre.

Select Texas and the Selection panel reads 43.1. Switch to imperial and it becomes 111.6 per square mile.

Now add the fifty one land areas in the table. They come to 9,152,086 square kilometres. Add the populations and you get 331,449,281, the published 2020 total for the fifty states and the District of Columbia.

What the numbers show

The country is far more concentrated than a map of equal looking states suggests. California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina hold half of all Americans between them, on 21.7 percent of the land.

The density range is the widest of any country in this series. The District of Columbia runs at 4,355 people per square kilometre. Alaska runs at 0.50. That is a ratio of nearly nine thousand to one, and it is why the density map uses banded colours rather than a smooth scale: a linear ramp would show the entire country as one shade with a single bright dot on the Potomac.

Alaska is 16.2 percent of the land area of the United States and holds 0.2 percent of its people. Texas has 254 counties, more than any other state, while Delaware has three and the District of Columbia is a single county equivalent. The 3,144 counties on this map are the units the state pages break down into.

Mistakes that catch people out

Mixing census years. State populations from different vintages look identical on the page and only reveal themselves when the total misses 331,449,281. Every figure here is 2020.

Reading the insets as scale. Alaska looks comparable to Texas in the box below the map. It is more than twice the size. The insets are fitted to their boxes, not to the mainland scale, and the map says so.

Treating the drawn area as land. Every state outline here includes its inland water. Michigan is the extreme case: about 41 percent of the area inside its boundary is water, because its share of the Great Lakes is included. Every density on this page is computed on land area, not on the area you see.

Comparing city dots with city populations. The Cities layer uses metropolitan figures, so the dot for Dallas covers a region rather than the municipality. It is the right basis for showing where people actually live, but it is not the number on a city limits sign.

Assuming counties mean the same thing everywhere. Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs and census areas, and several states have independent cities that sit outside any county. The Census Bureau treats all of them as county equivalents, which is how the count of 3,144 is reached.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Canada Map: the same treatment for all thirteen provinces and territories, with a detailed map behind each one.
• Coordinate Converter: latitude and longitude to UTM and back on the WGS84 ellipsoid, single or batch.
• United States Census Bureau, Geography: the source of the boundaries and land areas used here.
• Natural Earth: public domain map data behind the rivers and populated places.
• NASA Worldview: the imagery browser behind the satellite layer.

State boundaries and land area: United States Census Bureau, TIGERweb, public domain. Population: 2020 Census of Population and Housing. Rivers and populated places: Natural Earth, public domain. Satellite imagery: NASA EOSDIS Global Imagery Browse Services, Blue Marble shaded relief and bathymetry. Neither agency endorses this product.