US Map / Regions / South Atlantic
South Atlantic States Map
The most populous of the nine Census divisions, running the eastern seaboard from Delaware Bay to the Florida Keys.
From Delaware to Florida: the South Atlantic states
Eight states and the District of Columbia, strung along the eastern seaboard from Delaware Bay to the Florida Keys. It is the most populous of the nine Census divisions — about 69 million people in 2024, some 600,000 short of the entire Midwest region on its own — and the one where the Census label and everyday usage part company most sharply at the northern end.
| State | Abbr. | Capital | Largest city | Population (2024) | Land area (sq mi) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delaware | DE | Dover | Wilmington | 1,051,917 | 1,949 |
| Florida | FL | Tallahassee | Jacksonville | 23,372,215 | 53,625 |
| Georgia | GA | Atlanta | Atlanta | 11,180,878 | 57,513 |
| Maryland | MD | Annapolis | Baltimore | 6,263,220 | 9,707 |
| North Carolina | NC | Raleigh | Charlotte | 11,046,024 | 48,618 |
| South Carolina | SC | Columbia | Charleston | 5,478,831 | 30,061 |
| Virginia | VA | Richmond | Virginia Beach | 8,811,195 | 39,490 |
| West Virginia | WV | Charleston | Charleston | 1,769,979 | 24,038 |
Florida holds a third of the division's population on its own. West Virginia is the odd member: it is the only one with no Atlantic coastline at all, drains mostly west to the Ohio River, and exists because its counties refused to leave the Union with Virginia in 1861. Delaware is the second-smallest state in the country at 1,949 square miles of land.
Why Maryland and Delaware are counted South
Because the Census Bureau drew this division along the Mason–Dixon Line and never redrew it. Maryland and Delaware were slave states in 1860, the regional scheme was fixed in the decades after, and continuity of the statistical series has outweighed every argument for change since. Residents almost universally say Mid-Atlantic instead, and most non-federal maps group Baltimore and Wilmington with New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Both answers are defensible; only one of them appears in federal tables. The regions hub shows the official version, and the Mid-Atlantic page covers the informal one.
The division's largest cities
Jacksonville is the largest city in the division and, thanks to a 1968 city–county consolidation with Duval County, the largest by land area in the contiguous United States. Charlotte is close behind, then Baltimore, Atlanta, Raleigh, Miami, Virginia Beach, and Tampa. Washington sits inside the division as the District of Columbia, and at about 702,000 people it outranks every city on that list except Jacksonville and Charlotte. Florida contributes eight of the division's top-100 cities, more than any other state here; North Carolina adds five and Virginia four, while Delaware, West Virginia, and South Carolina contribute none at all.
Geography: three parallel strips
Almost every state in this division is banded the same way, west to east: mountains, Piedmont, coastal plain. The Appalachians form the western edge through West Virginia, Virginia, and the Carolinas, rising to Mount Mitchell in North Carolina at 6,684 feet, the highest point in the eastern United States, with the Great Smoky Mountains on the Tennessee line. The Piedmont is the rolling middle, and the fall line where it drops to the coastal plain fixed the sites of Richmond, Raleigh, Columbia, and Augusta — the last navigable point upriver.
East of that is low, wet, and sandy: the Chesapeake Bay, the Outer Banks, the Sea Islands, and finally the Florida peninsula and the Everglades. The Atlantic coast here is barrier-island coast for most of its length, and southern Florida wraps around to the Gulf.
Related divisions and regions
South Atlantic is the largest of the three divisions in the South; the others are East South Central and West South Central. North across the Mason–Dixon Line is Mid-Atlantic. Every state here is on Eastern Time except Florida, whose panhandle west of the Apalachicola River runs on Central Time.