US Map / Regions / Northeast

Northeast US Map

Nine states holding 17 percent of the country's population on 4.6 percent of its land — the smallest Census region and the most crowded.

Which states are in the Northeast?

Nine, and the Census Bureau has drawn the line the same way for over a century: the six New England states plus the three Mid-Atlantic states. Together they hold about 57.8 million people on roughly 162,000 square miles of land — less than two-thirds the land area of Texas alone, at about 357 people per square mile against a national figure near 96.

Maine is the outlier at both ends: it is the largest of the nine by area and the only state in the country that borders exactly one other state, New Hampshire. Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union at 1,034 square miles of land, and New Jersey is the most densely settled, with roughly 1,290 residents per square mile.

The Northeast's largest cities

The region's population sits on a narrow corridor between Boston and Washington. New York is the largest city in the United States, about 8.48 million people in 2024 — more than the next four Northeastern cities combined. Philadelphia follows at about 1.57 million, then Boston, the only city in New England on the national top-100 list. Newark and Jersey City sit across the Hudson from Manhattan; Pittsburgh anchors western Pennsylvania at the head of the Ohio River, and Buffalo faces Lake Erie at the far western end of New York. See the wider list on the US cities map.

Geography that shapes the region

The Appalachian Mountains run the whole length of the Northeast under a series of local names — the Green Mountains in Vermont, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, the Berkshires in Massachusetts, the Poconos and the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania. Mount Washington, at 6,288 feet in the White Mountains, is the highest point in the region. The Adirondacks of northern New York look like part of the same chain but are geologically an outlier of the Canadian Shield.

Everything east of the mountains drains to the Atlantic coast, which every state here except Vermont and Pennsylvania touches. In the west the picture flips: New York and Pennsylvania both front Lake Erie, and New York also holds a long shoreline on Lake Ontario, tying the region into the Great Lakes system. At Pittsburgh the Allegheny and Monongahela meet to form the Ohio, which carries Northeastern water to the Mississippi and the Gulf.

Census Northeast versus the Northeast people mean

This is the region where the official and the everyday definitions come closest, but they still disagree at the southern edge. The Census Bureau counts Maryland and Delaware in the South Atlantic division and therefore in the South, a classification fixed in the early twentieth century on the strength of the Mason–Dixon Line and the 1860 census. Most people who live there now say Mid-Atlantic, and travel writing, sports conferences, and weather forecasts routinely fold Baltimore and Wilmington into the Northeast. The Bureau has never revised it, because a region redefined is a century of statistics broken. The regions hub shows the full official table.

The other quiet disagreement is internal. New England is a real cultural unit with a name older than the country; "Mid-Atlantic" is a statistical label that most New Yorkers would not use to describe themselves. The Northeast holds together as a region mainly because of the Boston–Washington corridor of cities, not because anyone in Maine and anyone in Pittsburgh feels much in common.

The Northeast's two Census divisions

• New England (6 states)
• Mid-Atlantic (3 states)

The other three regions

Head west to the Midwest, south to the South, or across the plains and mountains to the West. When you want to test what you have just read, the Northeast map quiz covers exactly these nine states, and the blank US map is the printable version to label by hand.