US Map / Regions / West North Central
West North Central States Map
The Census division that puts St. Louis and Fargo in the same box — seven states, 43 people per square mile, one river tying them together.
The seven West North Central states
This is the Census division that asks the most of the reader: it bundles Missouri, which has two metro areas above a million people and Ozark hill country behind them, with North Dakota, which has fewer than 800,000 residents in an area the size of Washington state. Seven states, 507,621 square miles, about 22 million people — 43 per square mile, less than half the national figure.
| State | Abbr. | Capital | Largest city | Population (2024) | Land area (sq mi) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iowa | IA | Des Moines | Des Moines | 3,241,488 | 55,857 |
| Kansas | KS | Topeka | Wichita | 2,970,606 | 81,759 |
| Minnesota | MN | Saint Paul | Minneapolis | 5,793,151 | 79,627 |
| Missouri | MO | Jefferson City | Kansas City | 6,245,466 | 68,742 |
| Nebraska | NE | Lincoln | Omaha | 2,005,465 | 76,824 |
| North Dakota | ND | Bismarck | Fargo | 796,568 | 69,001 |
| South Dakota | SD | Pierre | Sioux Falls | 924,669 | 75,811 |
Missouri alone holds more than a quarter of the division's population. Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska follow; the Dakotas together add under 1.8 million.
Does the division hold together?
Only partly, and it is worth being honest about it. Missouri was a slave state, was admitted under the Missouri Compromise in 1821, and sits on the Mississippi with St. Louis facing Illinois; North Dakota was admitted in 1889 as spring-wheat country settled largely by Norwegians and Germans from Russia. Minnesota drains north to Hudson Bay as well as south to the Gulf. What the seven do share is the Missouri River: it crosses or bounds six of them, every state here except Minnesota, and it was the highway that opened all of them. The Census Bureau's grouping is a nineteenth-century convenience that survived because breaking it would break the statistical series — the same reason the South still contains Maryland. The regions hub sets the official grouping against the informal ones.
Cities and the empty spaces between them
Kansas City and Omaha are the largest, both around half a million, and both sit on the Missouri River. Minneapolis and St. Paul together form the division's biggest metro area, Wichita is the largest city in Kansas, St. Louis anchors eastern Missouri, and Lincoln is Nebraska's capital and second city. Des Moines, Sioux Falls, Fargo, and Bismarck lead the states that have no top-100 city at all. Between them the countryside is genuinely empty: several counties in the Dakotas and western Nebraska have fewer than two people per square mile.
Geography: headwaters, plains, and one range of hills
The Mississippi begins at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota and forms the eastern boundary of Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri. The Missouri enters from Montana, crosses the Dakotas behind a chain of large reservoirs, and turns east across Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri to meet the Mississippi above St. Louis. West of roughly the 98th meridian the country becomes the Great Plains: short-grass, semi-arid, and irrigated where the Ogallala Aquifer allows. Southern Missouri holds the Ozarks, the only real uplands in the whole division, and the Black Hills of South Dakota rise out of the plains as an isolated outlier of the Rockies.
Neighbors and next steps
This is the western half of the Midwest; the sibling division is East North Central. South is West South Central, west is Mountain in the West. Four of the seven states — Kansas, Nebraska, and both Dakotas — are split between Central and Mountain time, the densest cluster of time zone splits in the country.