Short

Six states have exactly one representative, and they are not alike

Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming each elect a single at-large member. The largest is 266 times the smallest.

By Sahil Manwani · September 4, 2026 · 2 min read

Six states are small enough in population to receive one House seat, so their district is the state. They are the only places in the country where the congressional map and the state map are the same drawing.

StateSquare kilometresCounty equivalents
Alaska1,713,37929
Wyoming252,84323
South Dakota199,54266
North Dakota183,98753
Vermont24,85014
Delaware6,4373

Alaska is 266 times Delaware. Both send one member.

What one seat changes

There is no redistricting to argue about, so these six states sit out every mid-decade map fight and every Voting Rights Act case about district lines. There is also no safe seat to retreat into: an at-large member runs statewide every two years, on the same electorate that elects the state's senators, which makes their races behave more like Senate races than House races.

Four of the six also have a Senate seat on the 2026 ballot. Alaska, South Dakota and Wyoming have a governor's race as well, which means three statewide contests on the same ballot with the same electorate and, in practice, largely the same campaign.

Delaware has a Senate race and no governor's race. Vermont has a governor's race and no Senate race, and its governor serves a two-year term, so Vermont runs a statewide executive campaign every single cycle.

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Referenced here

How this was produced

Every figure in this piece was computed from the public Census boundary files this site ships, or from the apportionment table it uses to build race pages. Nothing here is summarised from another publisher. Where a number is wrong, it is a bug in the method rather than a citation error, and the methods note describes the method well enough to check.

Electorate HQ is built and edited by Sahil Manwani, a biomedical engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin pursuing a minor in entrepreneurship.

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