US Map / Regions / New England
New England Map
Six states on 62,689 square miles — less land than Washington state, and the only Census division whose name predates the country.
The six New England states
New England is the one Census division whose name people actually use. John Smith put it on a map in 1616, the Council for New England was chartered in 1620, and the six-state membership has been stable ever since — no argument, no border disputes, no state that thinks it belongs somewhere else. The division covers 62,689 square miles of land, less than the single state of Washington, and held about 15.4 million people in 2024.
| State | Abbr. | Capital | Largest city | Population (2024) | Land area (sq mi) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connecticut | CT | Hartford | Bridgeport | 3,675,069 | 4,842 |
| Maine | ME | Augusta | Portland | 1,405,012 | 30,843 |
| Massachusetts | MA | Boston | Boston | 7,136,171 | 7,800 |
| New Hampshire | NH | Concord | Manchester | 1,409,032 | 8,953 |
| Rhode Island | RI | Providence | Providence | 1,112,308 | 1,034 |
| Vermont | VT | Montpelier | Burlington | 648,493 | 9,217 |
Maine is nearly half the division's land area on its own and is the only state in the country bordered by just one other state. At the other extreme, Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union. Vermont is the only New England state with no Atlantic shoreline; its water outlet is Lake Champlain, pointing north to the St. Lawrence.
Cities: one big one and a lot of mid-sized ones
Boston is the only New England city among the 100 largest in the country, at about 673,000 people in 2024. That number understates it badly — Boston's municipal boundary is tight, and the built-up area runs continuously through Cambridge, Somerville, and Quincy. Behind it come Worcester and Springfield in Massachusetts, Providence in Rhode Island, Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford in Connecticut, and Manchester in New Hampshire. Portland, Maine, and Burlington, Vermont, are the largest cities in their states with populations under 70,000 apiece. The national list is on the US cities map.
Geography: mountains, a fall line, and a very long coast
The northern Appalachians run through the division as the Green Mountains in Vermont, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Mount Washington, 6,288 feet, is the highest point in the northeastern United States and carries a weather observatory that has recorded some of the strongest surface winds ever measured on the continent. The Connecticut River rises at the Canadian border, forms the entire Vermont–New Hampshire boundary, and runs down through Massachusetts and Connecticut to Long Island Sound.
The Atlantic coast here is drowned and glacier-cut rather than sandy: rock headlands and thousands of islands in Maine, the sand spit of Cape Cod, and the deep harbors that made Boston, Providence, and New Bedford ports before there were roads worth using. Everything in the division was scraped by the last ice sheet, which is why the soils are thin and stony and why farming gave way to mill towns along the fall line early.
What holds New England together
Shared settlement history, mostly. The six states were founded within a few decades of each other by the same Puritan migration, they kept the town meeting as the unit of local government where the rest of the country adopted the county, and several of them still run on towns rather than functioning counties at all. That is a genuine institutional difference, not a nickname — it shows up whenever you try to build a county map of Connecticut, which abolished county government in 1960 and now has its federal statistics reported by planning regions instead of counties.
Up, across, and out
New England is the northern half of the Northeast; its sibling division is the Mid-Atlantic. The regions hub shows all nine divisions at once, and the other seven are listed under the Midwest, South, and West. All six states here run on Eastern Time with no split counties.