Long Beach Map
Long Beach shares San Pedro Bay with the Port of Los Angeles, and the two together move more containers than anywhere else in the country. About 451,000 people lived here in 2024.
Where is Long Beach?
Long Beach is on the coast of California at the southern edge of Los Angeles County, where the Los Angeles River reaches the sea. Downtown Los Angeles is about 25 miles north, Anaheim roughly 20 miles east, and San Diego some 100 miles southeast down Interstate 5. The city line runs right against the Orange County boundary.
Long Beach at a glance
| State | California |
| County | Los Angeles County |
| Population | 450,901 (2024 Census estimate) |
| Rank among US cities | No. 44 of the 100 largest |
| Time zone | Pacific Time |
| Region | West (Pacific division) |
No. 44 on the 2024 list is a margin of 3,907 people: that is how far Long Beach trails Virginia Beach, while Oakland is 7,347 further back. Within California it comes seventh of fifteen, behind six others, from Los Angeles down to Sacramento. Against California's 39.43 million residents, though, that is only about 1.1%. It holds about 4.6% of Los Angeles County's 9,757,179 residents.
Long Beach in California
It is the second largest city in Los Angeles County after Los Angeles itself, and one of a string of coastal and inland cities — Santa Ana, Anaheim, Irvine, Riverside — that the California county map packs into three adjoining counties. Los Angeles reaches down a narrow annexed corridor to its own port at San Pedro, immediately west of here, so the two harbors are separate cities on one bay. See the California state page for the wider state.
A harbor built, and oil under it
San Pedro Bay was an open, shallow bight until breakwaters and dredging turned it into a deep-water harbor early in the twentieth century — one of the largest artificial ports on the Pacific coast. Underneath the city is the Wilmington oil field, one of the biggest ever found in the state; pumping it out caused the ground in the harbor to subside by more than 20 feet before water injection stopped it, and several drilling platforms in the bay are landscaped and screened to look like small islands. Signal Hill, a separate city entirely surrounded by Long Beach, sits on the same anticline.
Cities near Long Beach
Nearby: Los Angeles, Anaheim, Santa Ana, Irvine and San Diego. The Pacific division page covers the coastal states.