THE CAPE MAY COUNTY LAND BRIEF
Land in the
Barrier Islands/Coastal Marshes setting.
Cape May County has 251.5 square miles of land in New Jersey. 3 mapped landscape regions meet across Cape May County: Barrier Islands/Coastal Marshes, Delaware River Terraces and Uplands, Pine Barrens.
Sandy coastal landscapes combine beaches, dunes, bays and marshes with oak-pine woodland. These pine-barrens settings form a transition between warmer southern coasts and rockier shores farther north.
Regional context: Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens ↗ · Regional mapping across the county footprint
Where the landscape changes
Cape May County intersects 3 mapped regional units. The largest mapped shares are:
- Barrier Islands/Coastal Marshes57.5%
- Delaware River Terraces and Uplands30.2%
- Pine Barrens12.3%
Middle Atlantic Coastal Plain in Cape May County
Low coastal plains contain terraces, estuaries, marshes and barrier islands. Unconsolidated sediments underlie this varied coastal setting, with forest patterns changing near streams and low-lying areas.
Read the regional source ↗Finding your parcel within Cape May County
The atlas lists 37 cities, towns, townships, and Census communities associated with Cape May County, including Middle, Upper, Dennis. The list includes overlapping geography types and does not divide the county into exclusive service areas.
Cape May County by land and water
The Census records 368.8 square miles of water within Cape May County, or 59.5% of its total area. That share is close to Cape May County’s 59.5%. This is geographic context; waterfront status and usable land must be checked at the parcel.
For scale, Cape May County has 3.6 times the land area of nearby Middle township (70.2 square miles). These areas describe boundaries, not comparable property prices.
The Census boundary meets Atlantic County, Cumberland County within New Jersey. A tract near one of these lines should be matched to the county identifier on its own records.