The South Atlantic States form one of the nine divisions within the United States that are formally recognized by that country's census bureau.

The division includes eight states — Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia — and also the District of Columbia. Together with the East South Central States (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee) and the West South Central States (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas), the South Atlantic States constitute the United States Census Bureau's broader region of the South (the other three regions being the Northeast, Midwest and West, all of which have two divisions therein).

Most of the area covered by the South Atlantic States comprises the New South, one of the nine moral regions into which the United States is divided in the 1991 bestselling non-fiction book The Day America Told The Truth, with the rest of the South being placed in a different moral region, that of Old Dixie. Some parts of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, along with the District of Columbia, are reckoned as belonging to Metropolis, with still another portion of West Virginia being classified in the Rust Belt.