Omaha Map
Omaha stands on the Missouri River bluffs at Nebraska's eastern edge, the point the transcontinental railroad was built west from, with about 489,000 residents in 2024.
Where is Omaha?
Omaha is at the far eastern edge of Nebraska, on the west bank of the Missouri River with Council Bluffs, Iowa, facing it across the water. The state line is the river, so the city's eastern boundary is also Nebraska's. It is about 55 miles northeast of Lincoln, roughly 185 miles north of Kansas City, and some 540 miles east of Denver.
Omaha at a glance
| State | Nebraska |
| County | Douglas County |
| Population | 489,265 (2024 Census estimate) |
| Rank among US cities | No. 41 of the 100 largest |
| Time zone | Central Time |
| Region | Midwest (West North Central division) |
No. 41 on the 2024 list is a margin of 4,289 people: that is how far Omaha trails Colorado Springs, while Miami is 2,251 further back. Lincoln is the only other Nebraska city on the list. One city government therefore accounts for about 24% of Nebraska's 2.01 million people. It holds about 81% of Douglas County's 601,158 residents.
Omaha in Nebraska
Douglas County is one of the smallest of Nebraska's 93 counties in area and holds close to a third of the state's population — the Nebraska county map shows dozens of thinly settled counties spread across the rest. Lincoln, the capital, is the only other Nebraska city in the national top 100, and beyond the two of them the state is farmland and sandhills. The Nebraska state page follows the Platte westward across it.
The Missouri, the loess hills and the railroad
The Missouri River is why the city is here: Omaha was chosen in 1863 as the eastern starting point of the Union Pacific, and the first miles of track ran west from the riverbank. The bluffs on both banks are loess — windblown glacial silt piled deep enough to stand in near-vertical faces, a landform that occurs at this scale in only a couple of places on earth. West of the bluffs the ground flattens into the tallgrass prairie that grades into the Great Plains further out.
Cities near Omaha
Nearby cities include Lincoln, Kansas City, Wichita, Minneapolis and Denver. The West North Central division page groups Nebraska with the plains states.