The Woodlands, Texas map

Because The Woodlands never incorporated, it has no city limits in the usual sense. Its boundary is the boundary of the township, which collects a sales tax, contracts for fire and law enforcement and runs the parks. That status was settled by a 2007 agreement with Houston that ended the threat of annexation, and residents voted in 2021 against becoming a city. On census tables it appears as a census-designated place, which is why its 114,436 residents in 2020 do not make it a ranked Texas city despite being larger than Beaumont or Round Rock.

Most of the township is in Montgomery County. The southwestern village of Creekside Park lies across Spring Creek in Harris County, which means part of The Woodlands is in a different county, a different school arrangement and a different set of county services from the rest.

The Woodlands occupies the wooded ground between Spring Creek on the south and Conroe on the north, with I-45 forming its eastern edge. Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport is about 20 miles southeast by way of the Hardy Toll Road or SH-99. Montgomery County held 620,443 residents in 2020, and The Woodlands together with Conroe accounts for a large share of that.

Corporate campuses along Research Forest Drive and I-45 — energy, health care and technology offices — make the township a job centre rather than a bedroom suburb, and traffic on I-45 runs heavily in both directions at rush hour. Lone Star College–Montgomery, in the College Park village, and Memorial Hermann and Houston Methodist hospitals near I-45 are the other large institutions inside the boundary.

Town Center is the one part of the township built at urban density. The Woodlands Waterway is a landscaped canal running from Lake Woodlands past the mall and the hotels, with water taxis on it and a trolley shadowing it on the street. Hughes Landing sits at the north end on the lake shore; Market Street is a street-grid shopping district a block west of I-45.

The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, opened in 1990 beside the Waterway, is the township's outdoor amphitheater and the summer home of the Houston Symphony. George Mitchell, who assembled the land and financed the development through Mitchell Energy, also funded the pavilion; his name and his wife's are on it. Over 100 miles of pathways run through the greenbelts that separate the villages, which is the design idea the whole place was built around: subdivisions strung along wooded corridors rather than laid on a continuous grid.