Coyotes live in every U.S. state except Hawaii. Once limited to the western plains, they’ve expanded their range across North America by roughly 40 percent since the 1950s, colonizing forests, deserts, mountains, suburbs, and major cities at twice the rate of any other North American carnivore.
From the Great Plains to All 49 States
Coyotes evolved on the open grasslands of the Midwest, where they thrived in shortgrass prairies, sagebrush flats, and arid deserts. For most of their history, that was their core territory. But starting in the early 1900s, sporadic sightings of coyotes began appearing in the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada. By the 1930s and 1940s, those reports were becoming routine.
The expansion into the Northeast followed a traceable path. Coyotes entered New York from the north through Ontario in the 1920s and 1930s, with the earliest confirmed report being a single animal in Franklin County in 1925. They became established in northern New York by the early 1940s, spread south along the New York/Vermont border in the 1950s, and reached the Catskills in the 1960s. By the 1980s, they were common throughout the state. In 1999, a coyote made it to Central Park in Manhattan. The southward and westward push through New York alone moved at roughly 78 to 90 kilometers per decade.
That pattern repeated across the entire eastern half of the country. Today, coyotes have colonized virtually all of eastern North America, becoming one of the most ecologically significant predators in the region.
Where They Live by Region
In the West, coyotes remain most abundant in the habitats they originally evolved in. They’re closely tied to sagebrush communities across the Intermountain region, with a particular preference for black sagebrush flats in places like eastern Nevada. In the Sierra Nevada of California, they show up in nearly every plant community but favor open grass, shrub, and young conifer areas. Western deserts, from the Sonoran to the Great Basin, support large populations year-round.
In the South, coyotes have spread through every state from Texas to Florida and up through the Carolinas. Studies in Georgia found that coyotes select home ranges with significantly more open land than what’s generally available in the area, and less forest cover overall. They do well in the patchwork of farmland, pasture, and woodland that defines much of the rural Southeast.
In the Northeast and Great Lakes states, coyotes occupy deep forests, agricultural land, suburban neighborhoods, and everything in between. They’re well established from Pennsylvania and New Jersey up through New England and into northern Maine. The Appalachian corridor, stretching from Georgia to Maine, provides continuous habitat.
In the Midwest and Plains states, coyote densities remain high across open grasslands, rangelands, and the mix of cropland and prairie that dominates the region. This is still their ancestral stronghold.
Eastern Coyotes Are Physically Different
Coyotes east of the Mississippi are not the same animal as their western counterparts. Eastern coyotes carry a mix of coyote, wolf, and domestic dog ancestry, a result of hybridization that occurred as coyotes moved through southern Ontario and Quebec, one of the only known zones where wolves and coyotes interbreed. This makes them noticeably larger, averaging about 40 pounds compared to the leaner western coyote.
These hybrids, sometimes called coywolves, are found throughout the Northeast: New Jersey and Pennsylvania up through New York, all of New England, and into the Canadian Maritime provinces. Their wolf genetics may give them an advantage in hunting deer and surviving harsh northern winters, which partly explains how successfully they’ve colonized heavily forested landscapes that pure western coyotes might find less hospitable.
Coyotes in Cities and Suburbs
Urban coyotes are no longer unusual. An estimated 4,000 coyotes live in the Chicago metropolitan area alone, one of the most studied urban coyote populations in the world. Los Angeles, Denver, New York City, Seattle, and dozens of other cities all have resident populations. Research from Ohio State University has found that dense human populations are actually linked to longer coyote survival, likely because urban environments offer fewer natural predators, abundant food sources like rodents and garbage, and limited hunting pressure.
Urban coyotes behave somewhat differently from their rural relatives. A study in Seattle found that city coyotes foraged in residential areas but stuck close to patches of forest, which provided cover and denning sites. This pattern holds in most cities: coyotes take advantage of parks, greenways, railroad corridors, and any strip of vegetation that connects food sources to shelter. They’re most active at dawn, dusk, and overnight, which is why many urban residents never see them despite living nearby.
State wildlife agencies are actively tracking urban coyote movements. The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, for example, runs a collaborative study with Utah State University in Wichita using GPS collars, trail cameras, and citizen-reported sightings to map how coyotes and foxes use different parts of the city.
The One State Without Them
Hawaii is the only U.S. state with no wild coyote population. The 2,400 miles of open ocean separating the islands from the mainland is a barrier coyotes can’t cross on their own, and there’s no land bridge or natural corridor that would allow colonization. Every other state, including Alaska, has an established coyote presence. Their ability to eat almost anything, from rabbits and rodents to fruit, insects, and pet food, combined with their tolerance for climates ranging from Arctic tundra to subtropical lowlands, makes them one of the most adaptable mammals on the continent.