What state am I in?

Near a state line

The example is downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Head a few miles west past State Line Road and you’re in Kansas City, Kansas: a different state with its own sales tax, speed limits and rules on everything from fireworks to alcohol.

On road trips, state lines decide the tolls, the gas prices and which highway patrol you’ll meet, and in a few places your time zone. If you’re within a few hundred yards of a line, check the map: the outline shows exactly where it runs.

State lines we checked

These points are only a few hundred feet apart, yet TIGERweb put them in different states when we checked them on October 31, 2026:

The four Four Corners points form a box about 360 by 290 feet (110 by 90 meters). New Mexico and Utah both have a San Juan County.

Bristol is two cities with the same name: Bristol, Virginia, and Bristol, Tennessee, with State Street running down the line between them. Texarkana works the same way, split between Texas and Arkansas.

What changes when you cross a line

• Sales tax: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon have no statewide sales tax, and the rest charge different rates.
• Driving rules: speed limits, hands-free phone laws and the minimum age for a license all vary.
• Time: several states are split between two time zones, among them Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana, so crossing a line (or driving within one state) can move your clock.
• Alcohol, cannabis, fireworks and gambling are all decided state by state.
• Tolls and gas tax, which is why gas can be noticeably cheaper on one side of a line.

Where the answer comes from

State boundaries come from the Census Bureau’s TIGER data, the official source used by federal agencies, through its TIGERweb service. Your location comes from your device: GPS on a phone, Wi-Fi on a laptop. We show the accuracy under the result, in feet or miles.

Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico aren’t states, but the Census treats them as state equivalents, so you’ll see them too (Old San Juan comes back as Puerto Rico, PR). The U.S. Virgin Islands are covered the same way; other territories, like Guam, come from OpenStreetMap instead.

Lakes, rivers and the sea

State lines run through water too. The Great Lakes are split between the states that touch them: a point in the middle of Lake Superior at 47.5, -87.5 is in Michigan, and one in Lake Erie at 42.2, -81.2 is in Ohio. Farther out than state waters, like 39.5, -73.6 off the New Jersey coast, there’s no state at all, and the tool tells you you’re at sea.

Along rivers, the line usually follows the river, but not always its current channel: rivers move, and the legal line sometimes stays where the river used to be. If you’re on a riverbank near a line, trust the outline on the map rather than the water.