US States by Region

Ask ten Americans which states are in the Midwest and you will get several different answers. But there is an official scheme: the US Census Bureau divides the 50 states into four regions and nine divisions, and that is the definition used in federal statistics, most academic work, and the majority of published datasets.

The Census scheme has some results that surprise people. Delaware, Maryland and Washington D.C. are all classified as South. Texas and Oklahoma are South rather than West. Missouri is Midwest, not South. These are statistical conventions rather than cultural claims, which is exactly why informal usage drifts away from them.

Informal regions that appear constantly in everyday speech, such as the Deep South, the Pacific Northwest, the Rust Belt, New England, the Bible Belt and the Sun Belt, have no fixed boundaries at all. New England is the one informal region that happens to match a Census division exactly.

Alaska is the outlier that makes the ranking hard to intuit: it is larger than Texas, California and Montana combined, and more than 400 times the size of Rhode Island. Eight of the ten smallest states are in the Northeast, a useful shortcut when you are learning the map.