There are 50 states in the United States. The number has not changed since 21 August 1959, when Hawaii became the 50th state, a few months after Alaska became the 49th. Forty-eight of the states are contiguous, sharing one block of land between Canada and Mexico, while Alaska and Hawaii are separate. Washington, D.C., the national capital, is not a state but a federal district, and Puerto Rico, Guam and the other inhabited territories are not states either. So the country has 50 states, one federal district and five inhabited territories.
Where the 50 Stars Come From
The simplest place to see the number is the flag. Each of its 50 white stars stands for a state, and its 13 red and white stripes stand for the original colonies that declared independence from Britain in 1776. The current 50-star design became official on 4 July 1960, the Independence Day after Hawaii joined. It is usually credited to Robert Heft, who designed it as a high-school project in Ohio in 1958 and got a B-minus for it, a grade his teacher is said to have raised after the design was adopted. It has been in use longer than any earlier version of the flag. The 48-star flag, used from 1912 to 1959, held the previous record.
The Original Thirteen
The first states were the Thirteen Colonies, which became states when they ratified the new federal Constitution. Delaware was first, on 7 December 1787, which is why it calls itself the First State. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland and South Carolina followed. When New Hampshire ratified on 21 June 1788, as the ninth state, the Constitution came into force. Virginia and New York joined that summer, North Carolina in November 1789, and Rhode Island, which had held out longest, on 29 May 1790.
How the Union Grew to 50
The other 37 states were added over 170 years as the country expanded westward. Each one was admitted by an act of Congress under Article IV of the Constitution, usually after a period as an organised territory with its own elected legislature.
| Period | Total | States admitted |
|---|---|---|
| 1787–1790 | 13 | The original 13 |
| 1791–1803 | 17 | Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio |
| 1812–1821 | 24 | Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri |
| 1836–1850 | 31 | Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, California |
| 1858–1867 | 37 | Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Nebraska |
| 1876–1889 | 42 | Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington |
| 1890–1896 | 45 | Idaho, Wyoming, Utah |
| 1907–1912 | 48 | Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona |
| 1959 | 50 | Alaska, Hawaii |
For much of the nineteenth century, admitting a state was bound up with slavery. Congress tried to keep a balance in the Senate between slave and free states, so states were often admitted in pairs. Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Maine entered as a free state and Missouri, in 1821, as a slave state. California's admission as a free state in 1850 was part of another compromise. West Virginia was created during the Civil War, in 1863, when its western counties broke away from Virginia after Virginia seceded, the only state formed by splitting from a Confederate state.
The busiest single year was 1889, when four states joined within ten days in November: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Washington. President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the statehood papers for the two Dakotas so that no one would know which he had signed first, and North Dakota is listed first only because it comes first alphabetically.
The Last Four: Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska and Hawaii
The 48 contiguous states were complete in 1912, when New Mexico was admitted on 6 January and Arizona on 14 February, Valentine's Day. For the next 47 years, the country had 48 states.
Alaska, bought from Russia in 1867 for 7.2 million dollars, and Hawaii, annexed in 1898, were territories for decades. Both had been pushing for statehood long before Congress agreed, partly because Southern senators feared the new states would elect representatives who supported civil rights. Alaska was admitted on 3 January 1959, and Hawaii followed on 21 August, after 94 per cent of its voters approved statehood in a referendum. Alaska instantly became the largest state, more than twice the size of Texas. Hawaii is the only state made up entirely of islands and the only one not in North America, sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Largest, Smallest and Most Populous
The states vary enormously. Alaska is the largest, at about 1.72 million km², more than a sixth of the country's total area. Rhode Island is the smallest, at about 4,000 km², so Alaska could hold more than 400 Rhode Islands. More comparisons are in our lists of the largest states by area and the smallest states.
By population, California leads with about 39 million people, more than the whole of Canada, followed by Texas and Florida. Wyoming has the fewest, fewer than 600,000. Yet every state, whatever its size, elects two senators, so Wyoming and California have equal weight in the 100-member Senate. Seats in the House of Representatives, set at 435 in 1913 and fixed there by law since 1929, are shared out by population after each census. California has 52, and six states, including Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming, have only one.
Grouping the 50 Into Regions
For statistics, the US Census Bureau divides the states into four regions. The Northeast has 9 states, from Maine to Pennsylvania. The Midwest has 12, from Ohio to the Dakotas and Kansas. The South, the largest group, has 16 states plus Washington, D.C., stretching from Delaware and Maryland to Texas and Oklahoma. The West has 13, including the Mountain states, the Pacific coast, Alaska and Hawaii. The four regions are split further into nine divisions, such as New England and the Pacific.
Borders and Oddities
The way the states fit together produces some curiosities. The Four Corners monument marks the only point where four states meet, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. Tennessee and Missouri border the most other states, eight each. Maine borders only one, New Hampshire, while Alaska and Hawaii border none. The Northwest Angle of Minnesota is the only part of the contiguous states north of the 49th parallel, reachable by land only through Canada. And the Kentucky Bend, a loop of the Mississippi River, is a small piece of Kentucky that can only be reached by road through Tennessee.
Four Commonwealths
Four of the 50 states officially call themselves commonwealths rather than states: Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The word reflects a historical preference for a term meaning a community governed for the common good. It makes no legal difference at all. They are states in every sense. The word is confusing because two US territories, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, are also called commonwealths, and they are not states.
What Is Not a State
Washington, D.C. was created as a federal district in 1790 so that the national capital would not belong to any single state. It has about 700,000 residents, more than Wyoming or Vermont, but no voting representation in Congress, a grievance summed up in the slogan "Taxation without representation" on its car licence plates. Since the 23rd Amendment in 1961 it has had three votes in the Electoral College for presidential elections. Bills to make it a state passed the House of Representatives in 2020 and 2021 but never passed the Senate.
The United States also has five inhabited territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa, plus several uninhabited islands in the Pacific and Caribbean. Their residents cannot vote for president and have only a non-voting delegate in Congress. Puerto Rico, with about 3.2 million people, more than roughly 18 of the states, is the most likely candidate to become the 51st state. Statehood won a majority in non-binding referendums in 2012, 2017, 2020 and 2024, though turnout and boycotts made several of those results disputed, and only Congress can admit a new state. Our guide to US territories lists them all.
States That Almost Were
The map could easily have looked different. In the 1780s settlers in what is now eastern Tennessee formed the State of Franklin, which sought admission to the Union but was never recognised and collapsed by 1788. In 1849 Mormon settlers proposed a vast State of Deseret covering most of the Great Basin and southern California. It was rejected, and Utah, a much smaller part of it, only became a state in 1896, after its leaders ended the practice of polygamy. The idea of a State of Jefferson, carved from southern Oregon and northern California, has been revived several times, most famously in 1941. Texas, under the resolution by which it joined the Union in 1845, may in theory split itself into as many as five states, though it has never tried.
The Constitution makes changes hard. No new state may be formed within the territory of an existing state, or by joining states, without the consent of the state legislatures concerned and of Congress. That rule is why the count of 50, fixed in 1959, has proved so stable, and why a 51st star would take far more than a vote in one place.