US Territories: Complete List of All Inhabited and Uninhabited Territories

The United States has 16 territories: 5 inhabited (Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands) and 11 uninhabited islands, atolls and reefs scattered across the Pacific and Caribbean. Together they hold about 3.6 million people who are American but cannot vote for the president who commands them.

Incorporated, Unincorporated, Organized: What the Labels Actually Mean

Every list of US territories uses these three words, and they are worth pinning down before the list makes sense.

Incorporated means the territory is considered part of the United States proper and the entire Constitution applies. Historically this was the status given to land expected to become a state — Oklahoma, Arizona and Alaska all passed through it. Today exactly one incorporated territory remains, and it has no permanent residents: Palmyra Atoll.

Unincorporated means the territory belongs to the United States but is not part of it in the constitutional sense. Only certain fundamental rights extend there automatically; the rest is up to Congress. All 15 other territories are unincorporated.

Organized means Congress has passed an organic act creating a local civil government. Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands are organized. American Samoa, remarkably, is not — it is unorganized, and governs itself under a constitution approved by the Secretary of the Interior rather than by Congress.

The Five Inhabited Territories

Puerto Rico

• Capital: San Juan
• Population: about 3.2 million
• Area: 9,104 km²
• Status: unincorporated, organized (commonwealth)
• Acquired: 1898, Treaty of Paris, after the Spanish-American War

Puerto Rico holds close to 90 per cent of everyone living in a US territory. It sits in the northeastern Caribbean and runs its own constitution, governor and bicameral legislature. Puerto Ricans have been US citizens since the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917 — granted, as it happened, two months before the United States entered the First World War — but citizenship there does not carry a presidential vote unless the person moves to a state. Six status referendums have been held since 1967, the most recent in 2020 returning 52 per cent for statehood on a low turnout. Congress has never acted on any of them. The island's economy is larger than that of several states, though it is still working through the 2017 bankruptcy restructuring and the damage from Hurricane Maria the same year.

Guam

• Capital: Hagatna
• Population: about 170,000
• Area: 544 km²
• Status: unincorporated, organized
• Acquired: 1898, Treaty of Paris

Guam is the largest island in Micronesia and the westernmost US soil, roughly 6,000 miles from San Francisco and closer to Manila than to Honolulu. Andersen Air Force Base and Naval Base Guam together occupy something like a quarter to a third of the island, which is why the territory's local slogan is that Guam is where America's day begins — it lies just west of the International Date Line, on Chamorro Standard Time, UTC+10. The indigenous Chamorro people are about 37 per cent of the population. Guam was occupied by Japan from 1941 to 1944, the only populated US territory to be held by an enemy power in the war. There is more on the wider island chain in the Mariana Islands guide.

US Virgin Islands

• Capital: Charlotte Amalie, on St Thomas
• Population: about 87,000
• Area: 347 km²
• Status: unincorporated, organized
• Acquired: 1917, purchased from Denmark for $25 million in gold

Three main islands — St Thomas, St John and St Croix — plus roughly 50 cays. The United States bought them during the First World War out of concern that Germany might seize the Danish West Indies and use them as a submarine base commanding the approaches to the Panama Canal. Danish rule left a durable oddity: the territory drives on the left, the only US jurisdiction that does, while importing American left-hand-drive cars. About 60 per cent of St John is US national park, donated by Laurance Rockefeller in 1956.

American Samoa

• Capital: Pago Pago
• Population: about 49,000
• Area: 199 km²
• Status: unincorporated, unorganized
• Acquired: 1900, Tripartite Convention

American Samoa is the exception on almost every axis. Its people are US nationals rather than US citizens — they carry US passports and can live and work anywhere in the country, but must naturalize to vote or hold most federal jobs. It is the only inhabited territory south of the equator, five volcanic islands and two coral atolls about 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii. Its clock, UTC-11, is the last in the United States each day, while Guam is the first: the country's inhabited span covers 21 hours.

The national status is not simply an oversight. Successive American Samoan governments have resisted automatic citizenship, on the grounds that it could expose fa'a Samoa — the communal system under which roughly 90 per cent of land is held by extended families under matai chiefly titles and cannot be sold to outsiders — to equal-protection challenge. When plaintiffs sued for birthright citizenship in Tuaua v. United States, the territorial government intervened against them, and the courts declined to extend it.

Northern Mariana Islands

• Capital: Saipan
• Population: about 47,000
• Area: 464 km²
• Status: unincorporated, organized (commonwealth)
• Acquired: covenant approved 1976, in force 1986; previously UN Trust Territory

The CNMI is the newest addition and the only one that joined by negotiation rather than war or purchase. Fourteen islands run north from Saipan in a volcanic arc; only Saipan, Tinian and Rota hold significant populations. Tinian's North Field was the airbase from which the B-29s carrying the atomic bombs took off for Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Immediately east of the chain the seafloor drops into the Mariana Trench, the deepest water on Earth at close to 11,000 m — covered in detail in the guide to how deep the Mariana Trench is.

The Eleven Minor Outlying Islands

• Baker Island: Pacific, National Wildlife Refuge
• Howland Island: Pacific, Amelia Earhart's intended landfall in 1937
• Jarvis Island: equatorial Pacific, wildlife refuge
• Johnston Atoll: central Pacific, former nuclear test and chemical weapons destruction site
• Kingman Reef: Pacific, almost entirely submerged
• Midway Atoll: North Pacific, site of the 1942 battle
• Palmyra Atoll: central Pacific, the only incorporated territory
• Wake Island: western Pacific, active military airfield
• Navassa Island: Caribbean, between Jamaica and Haiti; claimed by Haiti
• Bajo Nuevo Bank: Caribbean, disputed with Colombia
• Serranilla Bank: Caribbean, disputed with Colombia

Most are National Wildlife Refuges under the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and several sit inside the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, one of the largest protected marine areas in the world. Only Wake Island and Palmyra Atoll have any regular human presence, and that is contractors and researchers rather than residents.

How an 1856 Law About Bird Droppings Built a Pacific Empire

The odd shape of that list has a single explanation. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 authorised any US citizen who found an unclaimed island with guano deposits to take possession of it in the name of the United States. Guano was the most valuable agricultural fertiliser of the era, and the law was written to break a Peruvian export monopoly.

Roughly 100 islands were claimed under it. Most were later abandoned or recognised as belonging to someone else, but Baker, Howland, Jarvis, Johnston, Kingman, Midway and Navassa all entered US possession this way — which is why the United States holds sovereignty over a scatter of uninhabited specks thousands of miles from anywhere. The Act has never been repealed, and Navassa Island remains formally disputed with Haiti on that basis.

The Insular Cases and Being Foreign in a Domestic Sense

The legal architecture behind all of this dates to a series of Supreme Court decisions from 1901 onwards known as the Insular Cases. The question after 1898 was whether the Constitution followed the flag into newly acquired islands, and in Downes v. Bidwell (1901) the Court answered that it did not, at least not in full. Puerto Rico, the majority wrote, was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.

That produced the doctrine of territorial incorporation: unincorporated territories receive only fundamental constitutional protections, and Congress decides the rest. The reasoning in those opinions drew openly on the racial assumptions of the period about whether island populations were fit for full constitutional government, and the cases have been criticised from the bench for decades — Justice Gorsuch called for them to be overruled in a 2022 concurrence — yet they have never been reversed. Every anomaly further down this page traces back to them.

Representation, Taxes and the Citizenship Gap

No territory has a senator, and no delegate can vote on final passage of legislation on the House floor, though they may vote in committee. Residents cannot vote in presidential elections — the Electoral College is built from states and the District of Columbia, and territories are neither.

The tax arrangement is the usual counterpoint: residents generally pay no federal income tax on locally sourced income, but they do pay Social Security, Medicare and payroll taxes, and territories send people into the armed forces at rates at or above the national average. Guam has repeatedly recorded some of the highest military enlistment and casualty rates per capita of any US jurisdiction.

What Is Not a US Territory

Three categories get mixed into this list constantly.

The District of Columbia is a federal district, not a territory. It has no senators and a non-voting delegate, like the territories, but the Twenty-third Amendment gave it three electoral votes in 1961, so its residents do vote for president.

The Freely Associated States — Palau, the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia — are fully sovereign UN member countries. They were once administered by the United States under the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, and their Compacts of Free Association give the US defence responsibility and their citizens the right to live and work in America without a visa. They are independent nations, not possessions; see the Marshall Islands guide for how that arrangement works in practice.

Former territories account for the rest. The Philippines was a US territory from 1898 until independence in 1946. The Panama Canal Zone was US-administered from 1903 until it was handed back under the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties, with full transfer in 1999. Cuba was occupied but never annexed. Alaska and Hawaii were incorporated territories until statehood in 1959 — the last two additions to the 50 states.

Where the Status Question Stands

There is no single territorial movement, because the five inhabited territories want different things. Puerto Rico's politics have been organised around the status question for generations and are split between statehood, the current commonwealth arrangement and independence. Guam has pursued a decolonisation plebiscite that has been tied up in litigation over who is eligible to vote in it. The Northern Marianas negotiated its way in deliberately and shows little interest in changing. American Samoa has actively defended its distinct status against outside attempts to change it.

What the territories share is the underlying legal position: they are governed under Congress's plenary power over territory, on a doctrine written in 1901 that has outlived nearly every assumption it was built on. Anyone tracing how the United States came to span 21 time zones and three oceans will find the answer is mostly a war in 1898, a purchase in 1917, and a law about fertiliser passed in 1856.