How many states and territories does the United States have?

There are fifty states, the District of Columbia, and five permanently inhabited territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, the United States Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, along with several uninhabited minor outlying islands. The last states admitted were Alaska and Hawaii, both in 1959. Combined, the territories are home to more than three million people, which exceeds the population of several states.

Their political status is unusual and consequential. Residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas are United States citizens by birth. People born in American Samoa are US nationals rather than citizens, a distinction that limits certain rights and has been the subject of ongoing litigation. Residents of all five territories cannot vote in presidential elections while residing there, and each sends a single delegate or resident commissioner to the House who may participate and vote in committee but not on final passage of legislation. None has senators.

The District of Columbia sits in a different but related position. Its residents received presidential electors through the Twenty-third Amendment in 1961 and have a nonvoting delegate in the House, and they pay federal income tax, which produced the license plate slogan about taxation without representation. Statehood for DC and status change for Puerto Rico are both recurring and unresolved political questions, with Puerto Rico having held multiple nonbinding referendums producing varying results and turnout. The legal framework governing the territories rests substantially on the Insular Cases, a series of early twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions that have drawn sustained criticism, including from sitting justices, for the racial reasoning underlying them.