how big is el paso

El Paso is a large border city in far West Texas with roughly 680,000 people in the city and just under 900,000 in its broader metro area, spread over about 260 square miles.

Quick Scoop

City size in simple terms

• Population (city only, 2024 estimate): About 681,000 residents.

• Metro population: Around 870,000–880,000 people when you include surrounding El Paso and Hudspeth counties.

• Land area: About 258 square miles (roughly 670 square kilometers) of land.

• Density: About 2,600 people per square mile, so it feels like a medium-density big city rather than ultra-crowded.

How that “feels” on the ground

Think of El Paso as:

• Big enough to have multiple distinct neighborhoods, major highways, a real downtown, and suburban-style sprawl.
• Not as gigantic as Houston or Dallas, but still one of the larger cities in Texas and among the bigger U.S. cities by population.

• Physically stretched out along the Rio Grande and around the Franklin Mountains, which makes it feel long and spread rather than compact.

A quick comparison

You can picture it roughly like this (very approximate, just for feel):

• Similar city-population ballpark to places like Denver or Washington, D.C. (city proper, not full metro).
• Bigger than many well-known regional cities like Tucson or Albuquerque in raw city population.

So if you’re wondering “how big is El Paso?”: it’s a major regional city—sprawling in land area, solidly big in population, and the largest U.S. city along the Mexican border, paired directly with Ciudad Juárez across the river.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.