Five Out of Six Tom Green County Residents Live in San Angelo

Put 100 Tom Green County residents in a room, and about 83 of them would be San Angelo residents. That is the picture from the 2020 Census: 99,893 people in the city and 120,003 in the county as a whole. San Angelo is not simply the county seat. It holds five-sixths of the county's population in one place.

The land tells the other half of the story. San Angelo covered 59.7 square miles in the same census, while Tom Green County held 1,522 square miles of land. The city took up about 4 percent of the county's land but held roughly five-sixths of its people.

Those two land-area figures put the population split in focus. San Angelo's city limits hold a dense share of the county's people, while the other 96 percent of the land lies outside them. Population estimates will move from year to year, so the census totals work as a fixed 2020 snapshot. The basic pattern is the memorable part: a large West Texas county gathered around one compact urban center.