Texas map with cities

Texas cities cluster along a diagonal. The Texas Triangle connecting Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio (with Austin on its western edge) holds roughly two-thirds of the state's population on about a fifth of its land. I-35 and I-45 run along two sides of the triangle; I-10 closes the south.

Outside the triangle, cities sit where resources or the border put them: El Paso at the far western pass on the Rio Grande, Lubbock and Amarillo on the High Plains, Midland–Odessa over the Permian Basin oil fields, Corpus Christi on the coast, and Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville along the Mexican border.

Three interstates enclose the state's population core. I-35 runs from Dallas–Fort Worth south to San Antonio through Austin, about 275 miles; I-45 links Dallas and Houston in 240 miles; I-10 closes the base between Houston and San Antonio in roughly 200 miles. Inside that shape nothing is more than a day's drive from anything else — Austin to San Antonio is 80 miles on I-35, Houston to Austin about 165 on TX-71 and US-290 — which is why the corridor gets treated as one labor market and one freight problem.

Roughly nine in ten Texans live in a metropolitan area, and the four metros in or on the edge of the triangle hold about two-thirds of the state's 29,145,505 people. Outside it the map thins quickly: the only cities over 200,000 anywhere beyond the triangle are El Paso, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, Laredo and Amarillo.

Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington, 7,637,387 people across 13 counties, is the largest, with three anchor cities on this map — Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington — and Plano, Irving, Garland, Frisco and McKinney filling the gaps between them. Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land, 7,122,240 over nine counties, runs from The Woodlands in the north down past Sugar Land and Pasadena to Galveston Bay. San Antonio–New Braunfels, 2,558,143, climbs I-35 to New Braunfels. Austin–Round Rock–Georgetown, 2,283,371, is the smallest of the four and stacks along I-35 through Round Rock and Georgetown; its southern edge now meets San Antonio's around San Marcos.

Each region page groups the towns inside it. The Panhandle has Amarillo; the South Plains, Lubbock; the Permian Basin, Midland and Odessa; West Texas and Big Bend, El Paso along with Alpine and Marfa. North Texas covers the DFW cities plus Sherman and Paris near the Red River; East Texas and the Piney Woods hold Tyler, Longview, Lufkin, Nacogdoches and Texarkana; the Gulf Coast takes in Beaumont, Port Arthur, Galveston and Victoria, with the Coastal Bend around Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande Valley holding McAllen, Edinburg, Harlingen and Brownsville. Central Texas and the Hill Country take Austin, San Marcos, New Braunfels, Kerrville and Fredericksburg; the Brazos Valley, Bryan and College Station; the Concho Valley, San Angelo.

The population column below is city-proper: people inside the city limits on census day 2020. In Texas those limits move. Houston has annexed outward for a century and now covers roughly 640 square miles, and San Antonio has done the same across Bexar County, so both totals include subdivisions that an older state would count as separate suburbs. Cities hemmed in by their neighbours cannot do it, because no city can annex across another city's line.

Two consequences show up in the table. Dallas, at 1,304,379, ranks below San Antonio's 1,434,625 while sitting in the larger metro area — Dallas–Fort Worth is a single metropolitan area with two anchor cities and no combined city-proper figure, and Arlington's 394,266 belongs to a third city between them rather than to either. And the largest place with no city ranking at all is The Woodlands: 114,436 people governed as a township, not an incorporated city.

For the number that describes a whole urban area rather than a city hall's jurisdiction, use the metro areas map.