I'm interested in finding the most up-to-date latitude and longitude data for U.S. Congressional district borders. I'd prefer a human readable format (e.g. XML), but I'm writing my own code so I can work with just about anything if the format is well-defined. I only need the state, district, and the latitude and longitude points that define the borders for each district.

I need the borders for all U.S. Congressional districts. Is this a dataset that I can download from somewhere all in one place? Or do I need to track down the data for each state individually? (Or even worse, each district?)


You can download a full set of US Congressional districts from the National Atlas, which includes a link to recent congressional districts. Once you've downloaded and extracted the data, you can use ogr2ogr to translate the data into another format if Shapefiles don't work for you. For example:

wget "http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/nationalatlas/cgd112p020_nt00354.tar.gz"
tar zxvf cgd112p020_nt00354.tar.gz
ogr2ogr -f "GeoJSON" cgd112p020.json cgd112p020.shp

Which will give you a JSON file with human readable coordinates, along with a few other useful attributes.

  • That worked perfectly. I'd been to National Atlas before, but I had no idea how to work with shape files. Thanks a lot for including instructions on how to convert them to JSON. That's just what I needed. – Bill the Lizard Nov 12 '12 at 16:32
  • Great, glad we could help! – scw Nov 13 '12 at 6:52

National Atlas has the district boundaries in shapefile format, then it's fairly simple to use ogr2ogr to convert the shapefile to KML, JSON, GML, CSV, or other format


National Atlas is a great resource, but seem to lag behind a bit for some things. Currently, I only see the 112th Congressional Districts on their site, but the 113th Congressional Districts are current. You can now get them from the Census Bureau.

Disclaimer: I'm with GreatData.com and we sell Congressional Districts products, but not exactly what you're looking for, so I'm not pitching our products.

  • It appears that the 113th was released on April 2013, so the lag is at least one month, based on when this answer was posted. – congusbongus Mar 3 '15 at 5:50

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