Coordinates to state

Worked example: the DC point

Pasting 38.907, -77.037, the point this site stores for Washington, returns District of Columbia (DC). In other formats that point is 38°54'25.20"N 77°02'13.20"W and UTM 18N 323374.0E 4308428.8N.

Moving the point a few miles in any direction lands in Maryland or Virginia, which makes it a quick way to test border behavior.

How to use it

1. Paste coordinates into Paste coordinates and click outside the box, or click the map, search, or use GPS.
2. The first lookup loads the state outlines. Later lookups are instant.
3. The state name and postal abbreviation appear under the coordinate card. "Not inside a US state" means the point is offshore, outside the country, or the latitude and longitude were swapped.
4. Copy the point in any of six formats from the card.

How the state is found

The page loads state outlines from the us-atlas project, which are drawn from Census cartographic boundary files. A point-in-polygon test runs against each state until one contains the point. The test is local, so the coordinates you paste are not sent anywhere.

The outlines are simplified for the web. Very close to a state line the result can be wrong, especially along rivers. Official boundaries are in the Census TIGER/Line files.

Coordinate formats

Paste decimal degrees with latitude first, such as 38.907, -77.037, or degrees, minutes, and seconds with N and W letters. West longitudes are negative in decimal form, so every point in the 50 states has a negative longitude except for the part of the Aleutian Islands west of 180°.

A common mistake is swapping the order. If the result says the point is outside the US, check that latitude came first.

Going further

The state is often only the first question. For the county at the same point, with its FIPS code and population, use What county am I in?. For the whole state profile, open its page from the list of states.

Common uses

People use it to check which state a GPS point from a trail, drone, or survey falls in, and to confirm the state for coordinates in a form. It is also a quick sanity check on a dataset: a point that should be in Ohio but lands in the ocean has a typo in its numbers.