Boston Map
Boston fits about 673,000 people into roughly 48 square miles — a fraction of Phoenix's area with far more people per acre, and the only New England city in the national top 100.
Where is Boston?
Boston is on the eastern edge of Massachusetts, at the head of a harbor full of drumlin islands, where the Charles and Mystic rivers reach the sea. The state is small and the city sits close to its coast rather than its middle. It is about 190 miles northeast of New York, roughly 50 miles northeast of Providence, and some 450 miles east of Buffalo at the far side of New York State.
Boston at a glance
| State | Massachusetts |
| County | Suffolk County |
| Population | 673,458 (2024 Census estimate) |
| Rank among US cities | No. 26 of the 100 largest |
| Time zone | Eastern Time |
| Region | Northeast (New England division) |
No. 26 on the 2024 list is a margin of 5,464 people: that is how far Boston trails Las Vegas, while Detroit is 27,753 further back. No second Massachusetts city reaches the hundred. That is about 9% of Massachusetts's 7.14 million residents inside a single municipal line. It holds about 85% of Suffolk County's 793,144 residents.
Boston in Massachusetts
Boston is the seat of Suffolk County, one of only 14 counties in Massachusetts, and several of those counties no longer have functioning county governments — the Massachusetts county map explains what the lines still mean. The built-up area runs well past the city line into Cambridge, Somerville and Quincy, none of which Boston ever annexed, which is the main reason its population figure looks modest for a metropolitan area of this size. The Massachusetts state page has the rest of the state, from the Berkshires to Cape Cod.
A peninsula that was made bigger
The original town sat on the Shawmut Peninsula, joined to the mainland by a neck so narrow that it flooded in storms. From the 1820s the hills were cut down and the tidal flats filled in: Back Bay, the South End, much of the waterfront and the airport all stand on made ground, and the modern shoreline bears little relation to the colonial one. The harbor opens into Massachusetts Bay and the Atlantic coast, and glacial drumlins account for both the harbor islands and the hills the city was built over.
Cities near Boston
The nearest cities in the national top 100 are all outside New England: New York, Newark, Jersey City, Buffalo and Philadelphia. The New England division page covers the six states around it.