Explore every major river, lake, and reservoir in the United States on this interactive map. Click any feature to see its name, type, and size. Use the layer toggles to focus on rivers or lakes individually, switch to satellite imagery to see the actual shoreline of any reservoir, or search by name to fly straight to a specific waterway.

The map covers 112,968 mapped rivers and streams and 463,591 lakes, reservoirs, and other water bodies across the United States. State-by-state breakdowns and rankings sit below the map.

About the rivers and lakes shown

The features on this map come from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset (NHD), republished as the USA Rivers and Streams and USA Detailed Water Bodies services on ESRI Living Atlas. This is a generalized hydrography layer designed for nationwide cartography, not a survey-accurate channel trace. If you flip the basemap to Satellite at high zoom you will notice the blue lines do not always sit perfectly on top of the water you can see from the air, particularly on small tributaries.

• Rivers and streams are vector polylines representing the centerline of a flowline. A long river like the Mississippi is stored as many connected segments rather than one continuous line, so reported per-segment lengths are not the full course length.
• Lakes, reservoirs, swamps, and inundation areas are stored as polygons with a typed classification (Lake/Pond, Reservoir, Stream/River, Swamp/Marsh, Inundation Area, or Canal/Ditch).
• For zoomed-in detailed channel work, switch to the satellite or topographic basemap and treat the blue NHD overlay as an index, not a survey.
• The lake dataset only covers the contiguous United States and Hawaii. Alaska's waterbodies are not included in the underlying layer, so the Alaska page focuses on rivers only.

Longest rivers in the United States

Ranking is by the longest single mapped segment in the NHD; Alaska dominates the top 25 because Alaskan rivers are stored as fewer, longer segments than rivers in the lower 48.

Largest lakes in the United States

Surface area in square miles, from the USGS detailed water bodies layer. The Great Lakes dominate the list; the largest natural lake fully inside US borders is Lake Michigan.

States ranked by total river miles

Sum of the Miles attribute across every mapped river/stream segment in each state. This includes intermittent streams and canals. Click any state name to jump to its dedicated lakes & rivers page.

States ranked by total lake and reservoir area

Sum of mapped water-body polygon area, in square miles, intersecting each state. A note on the top of this list: the Great Lakes (Michigan, Superior, Huron, Erie, Ontario) cross state lines, so border states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York each get credited with their share of those huge water surfaces. That is why the top of this ranking looks Great-Lakes-heavy rather than reservoir-heavy.

Data sources & methodology

• Rivers and streams: USA Rivers and Streams feature service on ESRI Living Atlas, derived from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset. State attribution is taken from the layer's built-in State field.
• Lakes, reservoirs, swamps: USA Detailed Water Bodies feature service, also NHD-derived. State attribution is done by spatial intersection with the state polygon; large water bodies that cross state lines are counted in every state they touch.
• State boundaries: USA States Generalized Boundaries, ESRI Living Atlas.
• Rankings use SUM(Miles) and SUM(SQMI) queried server-side from the source layers. Totals will shift slightly over time as the NHD is updated.
• Search is a case-insensitive name match against the Name/NAME fields of both layers, returning up to 10 results each and fitting the map to the combined extent.