Blank map
Blank map of the United States: 48 states, no labels
A us states map without labels, drawn from the same Natural Earth geometry the rest of this site uses: the 48 contiguous states plus District of Columbia as 49 outlines, with Alaska and Hawaii kept in the tables where an honest canvas puts them. Print it, fill it in, then check the answer key and the areas of all 51 rows.
The map, unlabeled
Every outline sits where the state is, on one projection, with nothing moved or tidied up. The US is the map where people invert proportions most confidently: California is a long diagonal on the left and the third-largest row here, Texas is the biggest mass on the page, and the six New England states fit inside the last 12% of the canvas width. A map that spreads the eastern states out to give them room is a map of a country that does not exist.
The frame is derived, not assumed. Alaska and Hawaii use the same Web Mercator projection as the rest of the dataset but sit outside the contiguous block, so this canvas is calculated from the 49 outlines actually drawn: 1000 by 555 units. Nothing is rotated, re-centred or inset into a corner.
This printable blank US map covers the 48 contiguous states and District of Columbia; Alaska (1,487,846 km²) and Hawaii (16,292 km²) are absent from the canvas and in every table below. On the answer key a label is printed only where the outline is wide enough to hold one, so the small eastern states keep their two-letter codes.
Answer key — the same map with state abbreviations
These are the outlines above, referenced rather than repainted, so the key costs labels and not a second copy of the map. Hover any outline on a desktop browser to get its full name; on paper, read the small ones off the table underneath.
51 rows, 49 outlines
The data behind this map holds 51 entries — every state plus the District of Columbia — and the drawing step drops the 2 that cannot share a canvas with the rest. Band by band is the fastest way to see where the work is: a few enormous easy outlines in the west, dozens of small ones in the east. The last two columns are measured from the outline file, not copied from a textbook.
| Band | Rows | Drawn | Land (km²) | Straightest | Most vertices |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New England | 6 | 6 | 168,367 | Connecticut 19% | Maine, 89 pts |
| Mid-Atlantic | 3 | 3 | 275,534 | Pennsylvania 30% | New York, 143 pts |
| The South | 17 | 17 | 2,299,537 | Oklahoma 16% | Texas, 164 pts |
| Great Lakes | 5 | 5 | 778,803 | Ohio 12% | Michigan, 108 pts |
| Great Plains | 7 | 7 | 1,341,435 | North Dakota 67% | Minnesota, 104 pts |
| Mountain | 8 | 8 | 2,235,615 | Colorado 98% | Montana, 120 pts |
| Pacific | 5 | 3 | 2,338,089 | Oregon 17% | Washington, 197 pts |
All 51 rows, ranked by area
Ranked Alaska down to District of Columbia. The last column is the honest one: 49 of these rows have an outline on the canvas and 2 do not. Every area is the number the map was built from, so this ranking is the ranking the shapes are in.
| Rank | State or district | Abbr | Area (km²) | On canvas |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alaska | AK | 1,487,846 | no |
| 2 | Texas | TX | 686,280 | yes |
| 3 | California | CA | 409,375 | yes |
| 4 | Montana | MT | 379,374 | yes |
| 5 | New Mexico | NM | 315,197 | yes |
| 6 | Arizona | AZ | 295,217 | yes |
| 7 | Nevada | NV | 286,772 | yes |
| 8 | Colorado | CO | 270,006 | yes |
| 9 | Wyoming | WY | 253,938 | yes |
| 10 | Oregon | OR | 251,209 | yes |
| 11 | Michigan | MI | 249,386 | yes |
| 12 | Minnesota | MN | 224,186 | yes |
| 13 | Utah | UT | 219,563 | yes |
| 14 | Idaho | ID | 215,548 | yes |
| 15 | Kansas | KS | 211,813 | yes |
| 16 | Nebraska | NE | 200,071 | yes |
| 17 | South Dakota | SD | 198,081 | yes |
| 18 | North Dakota | ND | 181,565 | yes |
| 19 | Missouri | MO | 181,394 | yes |
| 20 | Oklahoma | OK | 180,573 | yes |
| 21 | Washington | WA | 173,367 | yes |
| 22 | Wisconsin | WI | 168,969 | yes |
| 23 | Georgia | GA | 152,525 | yes |
| 24 | Illinois | IL | 149,970 | yes |
| 25 | Florida | FL | 147,425 | yes |
| 26 | Iowa | IA | 144,325 | yes |
| 27 | Arkansas | AR | 137,527 | yes |
| 28 | New York | NY | 136,779 | yes |
| 29 | Alabama | AL | 134,140 | yes |
| 30 | North Carolina | NC | 128,577 | yes |
| 31 | Mississippi | MS | 123,869 | yes |
| 32 | Louisiana | LA | 119,706 | yes |
| 33 | Pennsylvania | PA | 119,161 | yes |
| 34 | Ohio | OH | 116,135 | yes |
| 35 | Tennessee | TN | 109,044 | yes |
| 36 | Kentucky | KY | 104,052 | yes |
| 37 | Virginia | VA | 102,771 | yes |
| 38 | Indiana | IN | 94,343 | yes |
| 39 | Maine | ME | 83,241 | yes |
| 40 | South Carolina | SC | 79,959 | yes |
| 41 | West Virginia | WV | 62,550 | yes |
| 42 | Maryland | MD | 25,106 | yes |
| 43 | Vermont | VT | 24,533 | yes |
| 44 | New Hampshire | NH | 24,152 | yes |
| 45 | Massachusetts | MA | 21,204 | yes |
| 46 | New Jersey | NJ | 19,594 | yes |
| 47 | Hawaii | HI | 16,292 | no |
| 48 | Connecticut | CT | 12,635 | yes |
| 49 | Delaware | DE | 5,290 | yes |
| 50 | Rhode Island | RI | 2,602 | yes |
| 51 | District of Columbia | DC | 143 | yes |
Biggest and smallest, side by side
State areas are the least intuitive numbers in American geography, because the map everyone remembers has already been resized twice. The last column divides each row by District of Columbia, so it says how many of the bottom of the table fit inside the shape at the top.
| State or district | Abbr | Area (km²) | × DC | On canvas |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alaska | AK | 1,487,846 | 10,405 | no |
| Texas | TX | 686,280 | 4,799 | yes |
| California | CA | 409,375 | 2,863 | yes |
| Montana | MT | 379,374 | 2,653 | yes |
| New Mexico | NM | 315,197 | 2,204 | yes |
| Arizona | AZ | 295,217 | 2,064 | yes |
| District of Columbia | DC | 143 | 1 | yes |
| Rhode Island | RI | 2,602 | 18 | yes |
| Delaware | DE | 5,290 | 37 | yes |
| Connecticut | CT | 12,635 | 88 | yes |
| Hawaii | HI | 16,292 | 114 | no |
| New Jersey | NJ | 19,594 | 137 | yes |
Two comparisons are worth memorising. Texas is 9% of the land on this canvas and still gets drawn at half its size. California outweighs the 6 smallest rows combined — 409,375 km² against 56,556 km² — for a state that reads as a strip on the left edge.
Which state outlines people get wrong most often
These are read off the outline file, not argued about. Points is how many vertices a shape is plotted from, pieces is how many disconnected shapes it arrives as, and straight edge is how much of the border is a surveyed line. A large state with a low straight share is the painful kind: every edge is a decision you have to make from memory.
| State | Points | Pieces | Straight edge | On canvas |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michigan | 108 | 1 | 7% | yes |
| Florida | 156 | 12 | 15% | yes |
| California | 175 | 7 | 9% | yes |
| Washington | 197 | 9 | 10% | yes |
| Maryland | 48 | 2 | 10% | yes |
| Colorado | 85 | 1 | 98% | yes |
| Hawaii | — | — | — | no |
Michigan — on the canvas, and the classic collapse. Two peninsulas become one mitten: the upper one gets drawn as a bump instead of a shallow arm running west along Lake Superior, and the straits disappear. Draw the gap first and the shape stops being a blob.
Florida — on the canvas, in 12 pieces. People draw a fat sausage; the outline tapers hard, with the west coast bulging towards the panhandle and the east coast running almost straight down to the Keys. Its box is 1.03 wide per unit of height, not the long thin strip memory insists on.
California — on the canvas, 175 points in 7 pieces. The coast facing Baja California is one clean north-west to south-east diagonal, and it is the line the whole left side of the map hangs off: get the diagonal right and the stepped east edge follows.
The straight-line west — on the canvas, and free. Colorado is 98% axis-aligned, Wyoming 96%, Utah 92%: four lines and a notch. The large states at the other end — Iowa 2%, Georgia 5%, Virginia 5% and Minnesota 6% — have water for every edge, and that is where marks get lost.
Maryland — on the canvas, and the strangest outline east of the Mississippi: 48 points in 2 pieces, 1.95 wide per unit of height, with a diagonal notch taken out of its south-west by District of Columbia. Almost nobody draws the Chesapeake cutting into its east, which is the feature that makes it recognisable.
Hawaii — not on the canvas. A chain of islands stepping south-east, which at this scale would be scattered dots for 16,292 km² of land, so it lives in the tables, along with Alaska at 1,487,846 km². Of what is drawn, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia sprawl sideways and Delaware, New Hampshire and New Jersey run tall.
How to use a blank map of the United States
- 01
Print it landscape, at fit-to-page
The drawing area is 1.8 times wider than it is tall — 1000 units by 555 — close to the shape of a landscape sheet, so there is nothing to crop. The outlines are inline SVG, so they print as black lines on white at any paper size.
- 02
Draw the frame before any state
Four lines get most of a US map down: the 49th parallel across the top, the Gulf and Atlantic coast on the right, the diagonal of the west coast, the straight southern edge of Texas. Everything after that only has to be right next to its neighbours.
- 03
Work in bands, west to east
Pacific, Mountain, Great Plains, Great Lakes, then the South, Mid-Atlantic and New England. The western bands are a few huge easy outlines that set proportions; the eastern ones are small shapes that only fit once the frame is fixed.
- 04
Add the two missing states from the table
Nothing drawn here is Alaska or Hawaii, so write the largest and smallest rows onto a spare sheet with their areas. A wall map that insets both in the corner without saying they are not to scale lets that gap stay a gap.
- 05
Redraw the same map straight away
Mark what you missed, print a second copy and fill it in again in the same sitting. The second pass is where the learning happens: on the drawing game it usually adds ten to twenty accuracy points, because the feedback names the part you lost.
One drill worth the time: cover the answer key and write the abbreviations in order of size, largest first. If your mental map holds Texas at 686,280 km² and Rhode Island at 2,602 km² in the right proportion — 264 of them to one — the mid-sized states stop drifting.
Other blank maps
Blank map of the United States — questions
Is this a blank map of the 50 states?
It is a blank map of the 48 contiguous states plus District of Columbia (143 km², drawn from 9 points — the shortest outline on this canvas). That is 49 outlines, which is what one printable canvas can honestly hold. Alaska and Hawaii are in every table here but not on the map, because projected on the same maths they fall outside the box the contiguous states share.
Can I print this blank US map for free?
Yes. The outlines are inline SVG rather than a picture, so they print as black lines on white and stay sharp at any paper size. Use your browser's print command and choose landscape — the drawing area is 1000 by 555 units, 1.8 to one, so a landscape sheet loses very little. Nothing to download, no account, and the labelled answer key is on this same page.
Why are Alaska and Hawaii missing?
Alaska is 1,487,846 km² — 21.7 times Texas and 15.8% of all 51 rows — so drawing it beside the contiguous states at true scale would stretch the canvas until the eastern states were a few pixels wide. Hawaii is 16,292 km² spread across an island chain thousands of kilometres long. Both stay in the tables.
Why does Michigan look like one blob?
The source geometry hands it over as a single path: Michigan is 108 points in 1 outline, with its two peninsulas joined across the straits because that water gap is narrower than the detail the file keeps. States that really do arrive in pieces show it — Washington in 9 shapes, Florida in 12. When you draw Michigan, put the gap back.
Are the state borders accurate?
They are measured, not remembered: every outline comes from Natural Earth's 50m admin-1 layer (public domain), thinned with a Douglas–Peucker pass that gives larger states a bigger vertex budget, then drawn in the same Web Mercator projection the site's world maps use. Surveyor's lines stay straight — Colorado is 98% axis-aligned — while water-made edges stay crooked, like Iowa at 2%.
Which state is biggest, and which is smallest?
Alaska, at 1,487,846 km², is the largest row — but it is off the canvas, so the largest outline you can draw here is Texas at 686,280 km², 9% of the land on this map and 264 times Rhode Island (2,602 km²). District of Columbia is the smallest row at 143 km².
How do I practise shapes rather than names?
Fill this map in for placement, then use the game for the outlines: you draw a shape from memory, it is scaled and centred against the real border, and you get an accuracy score plus a nine-sector grid showing which part you lost. The state-specific method — frame, straight edges, rivers, region order — is on the how-to-draw-US-states page.