Washington’s Six Regions

Short answer: Washington has no single official set of regions. Explore Washington State uses six, taken from the Washington State Department of Transportation map: Northwest, Olympic, Southwest, North Central, South Central and Eastern. Geography classes teach five natural land regions, and the state’s tourism organization uses seven travel regions. Each map is right for its own job.

Washington is a big state doing an impression of two. Every state park, coffee shop and business in our directories is filed into one of six regions. This page says what those six are, which counties sit in each, and why we chose them.

One rule runs the whole system: a place gets its region from its county.

Not the city name, not how a place feels, not which side of the mountains you reckon it is on. We look up the county, and the county decides. It means the answer is the same every time, and it means we are never arguing about it.

NorthwestOlympicSouthwestNorth CentralSouth CentralEastern
The six regions of Washington State, by county. Boundaries from the Washington State Department of Transportation.

The six regions

Northwest Washington

Island · King · San Juan · Skagit · Snohomish · Whatcom

The San Juans and Whidbey, Bellingham and Everett and Seattle, and the North Cascades standing behind all of it.

Olympic Peninsula and South Sound

Clallam · Grays Harbor · Jefferson · Kitsap · Mason · Pierce · Thurston

The Olympic Peninsula and its rainforest, the Pacific beaches at Westport and Ocean Shores, Hood Canal, and the south sound at Tacoma and Olympia.

Southwest Washington

Clark · Cowlitz · Klickitat · Lewis · Pacific · Skamania · Wahkiakum

The lower Columbia and Vancouver, the Gorge as far east as Goldendale, Mount St. Helens, and the Long Beach Peninsula.

North Central Washington

Chelan · Douglas · Grant · Okanogan

Lake Chelan, Leavenworth and Wenatchee, the Methow Valley, and the coulee country out around Dry Falls.

South Central Washington

Asotin · Benton · Columbia · Franklin · Garfield · Kittitas · Walla Walla · Yakima

The Yakima Valley, Ellensburg and the Kittitas Valley, the Tri-Cities, Walla Walla wine country, and the Snake River down to Clarkston.

Eastern Washington

Adams · Ferry · Lincoln · Pend Oreille · Spokane · Stevens · Whitman

Spokane, the Palouse wheat country, and the lakes and mountains of the far northeast corner.

Six, five or seven: the three maps of Washington

Ask what the regions of Washington are and you can get three different answers, because three different maps are in common use.

  • The road map, six regions. The Department of Transportation divides the state into Northwest, Olympic, Southwest, North Central, South Central and Eastern. Every county sits in exactly one of them, so every town gets exactly one answer. This is the map Explore Washington State uses.
  • The geography map, five regions. Washington history classes teach five natural land regions: the coast, the western lowlands around Puget Sound, the Cascade Mountains, the Columbia Plateau and the Rocky Mountain highlands in the northeast. Textbooks name and draw them a little differently, and the lines follow landforms, not county lines.
  • The travel map, seven regions. The state’s tourism organization groups the state into seven travel regions for trip planning, with Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia together as Metro Puget Sound and separate regions for the Peninsulas and Wine Country.

None of the three is wrong. We use the road map because it gives one clean answer per county, which is what a directory of thousands of places needs.

Why we use the state road map

We used to run eight regions of our own, drawn for travel rather than for accuracy. They were a nuisance. Every county anywhere near a boundary became an argument we had to have again with each new listing. Is Kittitas central or east? Do the San Juans get their own bucket? Six regions defined by county, taken from an official source, retire the argument completely.

There is a second reason, and it matters more than tidiness. Explore Washington State already pulls live road and park alerts from WSDOT. Using their regions means our alerts and our directories speak one language, so when an alert names the Olympic region it means exactly the counties this page says it does.

Two things that surprise people

Tacoma is in the Olympic region

Pierce County is Olympic on the state map, so Tacoma is an Olympic region city and so is Olympia. You will also notice that Puget Sound is not one of the six names, which catches people who have lived here their whole lives.

We kept the official boundaries rather than redraw the state to match how it feels from the freeway. That is the cost of using a real map instead of a pretty one, and we decided it was worth paying.

The coast is split down the middle of a beach

Twin Harbors State Park sits in Grays Harbor County, so it is Olympic. Grayland Beach, a few miles south along the same stretch of sand, sits in Pacific County, so it is Southwest. The county line runs through the beach.

We could quietly fudge that one. We would rather tell you the rule is the rule.

Where you will see them

Every entry in these directories carries a region, and several of them let you filter by it.

The six regions and the counties in each come from the Washington State Department of Transportation offices and regions map, in effect since 1 November 1995. Thirty nine counties, every one assigned, none of them in two places at once.