US Map / Regions / West South Central
West South Central States Map
Texas holds roughly 73 percent of this division's population, which makes every statistic about it mostly a statistic about Texas.
Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana
One state and three others. Texas holds about 31.3 million of the division's 43.1 million people — roughly 73 percent — and 261,232 of its 425,066 square miles. Any statistic reported for West South Central is, in practice, a statistic about Texas with a Louisiana-and-Oklahoma-shaped correction.
| State | Abbr. | Capital | Largest city | Population (2024) | Land area (sq mi) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arkansas | AR | Little Rock | Little Rock | 3,088,354 | 52,035 |
| Louisiana | LA | Baton Rouge | New Orleans | 4,597,740 | 43,204 |
| Oklahoma | OK | Oklahoma City | Oklahoma City | 4,095,393 | 68,595 |
| Texas | TX | Austin | Houston | 31,290,831 | 261,232 |
Louisiana is the only state in the country whose county-equivalents are parishes, a direct survival of French and Spanish ecclesiastical administration. Oklahoma was Indian Territory until statehood in 1907, which is why its eastern half still contains large tribal jurisdictions and why its boundaries look improvised — the panhandle is a 34-mile-tall strip left over when Texas surrendered its claims north of 36°30′, the Missouri Compromise latitude, in the Compromise of 1850.
Does this division mean anything?
Less than most. The four states share a Gulf-and-plains geography and a nineteenth-century history of cotton and cattle, but Louisiana's French Catholic settlement, Oklahoma's tribal history, Arkansas's Ozark uplands, and Texas's own two-decade run as an independent republic pull in different directions. In ordinary speech the division dissolves: western Texas and Oklahoma get called the Southwest, eastern Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas get called the South or the Gulf South, and the Texas panhandle is plains country. The Census keeps the block because it needs a fourth corner for the South. The regions hub explains how the four regions and nine divisions nest.
Cities
Seven of the ten largest cities in the division are Texan: Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Arlington between the last two, and El Paso, which sits nearly 550 miles west of San Antonio and keeps Mountain Time. Outside Texas the leaders are Oklahoma City, Tulsa, New Orleans, and Little Rock. New Orleans is the clearest case in the country of a major city shrinking and staying shrunk: its population has never returned to its pre-2005 level. Compare the whole list on the US cities map.
Geography: two rivers and a coast
The Mississippi River forms Arkansas's eastern border, cuts through Louisiana, and empties into the Gulf below New Orleans in the only true delta on the list. The Arkansas River rises in the Colorado Rockies and crosses Kansas and Oklahoma before running the length of Arkansas to the Mississippi; it is the reason Tulsa and Little Rock are where they are. The Rio Grande forms the entire Texas–Mexico border, about 1,250 miles of it.
Between the rivers the land is layered. The Gulf coast and its marshes run from the Sabine River around to Brownsville; north of that the coastal plain gives way to the Ouachita Mountains and the Ozarks across northern Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma, the only substantial uplands between the Appalachians and the Rockies. West Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle sit on the Great Plains, and far West Texas crosses into Chihuahuan Desert basin-and-range country.
Adjacent divisions
East is East South Central, north is West North Central in the Midwest, and west is Mountain in the West. The third division of the South is South Atlantic. All four states run on Central Time except the two westernmost Texas counties.