Midland County Texas map
31.81° N · 102.00° W · County seat: Midland · 902 sq mi
Midland County was named for a railroad timetable: the townsite was the midpoint between Fort Worth and El Paso on the Texas and Pacific. A century later the same 902 square miles hold the headquarters end of the American oil business, with the Spraberry Trend directly underneath and pump jacks working between subdivisions inside the city limits.
The city of Midland sits in the north-center of the county; the airport is west toward the Ector County line.
Where Midland County is
The county sits on the flat southern lip of the Llano Estacado in far West Texas, roughly 300 miles west of Fort Worth and about the same distance east of El Paso. Martin County is north, Glasscock east, Reagan southeast, Upton south, Ector west and Andrews northwest. It was carved from Tom Green County in 1885, the same year the county seat took its name.
The defining relationship is with Ector County next door. Midland and Odessa are 20 miles apart on I-20 and have been paired for a century — one railroad, one oil basin, one labor market, one airport. Midland got the banks, the law firms, the geologists and the operating companies; Odessa got the drilling contractors, the pipe yards and the petrochemical plant. Neither city has ever absorbed the other, and the county line runs down the middle of the gap. A sliver of Odessa's city limits actually lies inside Midland County, and a sliver of Midland's lies in Martin County.
Big Spring is 43 miles northeast, San Angelo 95 miles southeast and Lubbock 122 miles north across the Caprock.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population 2020 |
|---|---|---|
| Midland (county seat, part) | City | 132,826 |
| Odessa (part) | City | 3,793 |
Both cities straddle a county line. The figures are the parts inside Midland County; Odessa's city total is 114,428.
There is no third incorporated place. Greenwood, southeast of the city along FM 307, and Cotton Flat to the southwest are school-district and community names rather than towns. Roughly 98 percent of the county's residents live inside the Midland city limits.
Roads and the airport
- I-20 – crosses the county east–west along the south side of Midland, continuing to Odessa in one direction and Big Spring in the other.
- Loop 250 – wraps the north, west and east sides of the city, the route most local traffic uses.
- SH-191 – the divided highway west to Odessa, north of and parallel to I-20, past the airport and the college campuses.
- SH-349 – north to Lamesa, south to Rankin in Upton County.
- SH-158 – southeast toward Garden City in Glasscock County and on to Sterling City.
- Business I-20 / old US-80 – the original highway through downtown, alongside the Union Pacific line that began as the Texas and Pacific.
Midland International Air & Space Port sits on the county's western side, about 10 miles from downtown Midland and 12 from downtown Odessa, deliberately placed between them. It is the commercial airport for both cities and the busiest in West Texas outside El Paso, and it holds an FAA spaceport license for horizontal-launch operations, which is where the second half of the name comes from. Its runways were built as Midland Army Airfield during the Second World War.
The Spraberry underneath
The Spraberry Trend, a stacked set of tight oil zones a mile and a half down, runs beneath most of Midland County and the counties on either side. It was discovered in the late 1940s, and for decades it produced slowly because the rock will not give up oil without help; horizontal drilling and multi-stage fracturing changed that after 2009 and turned the Midland Basin — the eastern half of the Permian — into the most productive oil area in the United States. The county's population grew by more than 30,000 between 2010 and 2020 as a direct result, and the 2024 Census estimate puts it above 183,000.
What that looks like on a map: a grid of section-line lease roads across the whole county, tank batteries every mile or so, gas flares visible at night from I-20, and a downtown of oil-company towers that is the tallest skyline between Fort Worth and El Paso. The Permian Basin Petroleum Museum on I-20 covers the geology and the boom history. The county has no river and no reservoir; municipal water comes from well fields to the north and from Colorado River water district reservoirs to the east, and rainfall averages under 15 inches a year.