The 13 Districts of the Hunger Games: What Each One Does, and Where They Are

Spoiler level: this guide covers the original trilogy and its films, including what Mockingjay reveals about District 13, plus a few details from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Nothing from Sunrise on the Reaping beyond the fact that Haymitch is from District 12.

What is Panem?

Panem is the country in the Hunger Games: a nation built in North America after floods, fires, storms and war wrecked the old world. It’s made up of one ruling city, the Capitol, and thirteen districts spread across the continent. The Capitol sits in the Rocky Mountains; the districts surround it.

For most of the story, Panem is a dictatorship. Each district has to produce goods for the Capitol, and the Capitol keeps control with its Peacekeepers, public punishments and, every year, the Hunger Games. The districts rose up in a three-year war, the Dark Days, which ended 74 years before Katniss’s story. They lost, and the Games were created as the punishment.

What does each district make?

Every district has one assigned industry, and almost everything it produces goes to the Capitol. If you were born in a district, that industry was usually your future: you couldn’t leave, travel to another district, or easily choose different work.

District	What it makes	Rich or poor	Who you know from there	One detail
1	Luxury goods	Richest district · Career	Glimmer, Marvel, Gloss, Cashmere	Katniss has heard it owns a machine that turns graphite into diamonds
2	Masonry (stone), plus weapons and Peacekeepers	Rich, the Capitol’s favourite · Career	Cato, Clove, Enobaria, Brutus	Home of the Nut, a mountain fortress holding much of the Capitol’s military
3	Electronics and technology	Not stated in the books	Beetee, Wiress	Beetee once redesigned the underground network that carries Panem’s broadcasts
4	Fishing	Rich · Career in the books (not in the first film)	Finnick, Mags, Annie	Its bread is a salty, fish-shaped loaf tinted green with seaweed
5	Power	Not stated in the books	Foxface	Its industry comes from promotional material for the 2012 film, not the novels
6	Transportation	Not stated in the books	The two morphling-addicted victors	Also revealed by film promotion; in Catching Fire, Katniss says District 3 makes cars
7	Lumber and paper	Not stated	Johanna Mason, Blight	Children seem to start work young, which is why its tributes can handle axes
8	Textiles	Not stated	Woof, Cecelia, Paylor	It makes Peacekeeper uniforms, and it was the first district to rise up after Katniss’s Games
9	Grain	Poor	No famous names	The least-described district: the trilogy only hints at its industry
10	Livestock	Not stated	Dalton	It slaughters cattle and hogs, and implants long-frozen cow embryos to keep its herds genetically varied
11	Agriculture (orchards, grain, cotton)	Second poorest	Rue, Thresh, Chaff, Seeder	Workers who grow the food aren’t allowed to eat it; a 35-foot fence and watchtowers surround the district
12	Coal (medicine after the war)	Poorest and smallest	Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch, Lucy Gray Baird	Only four victors in 75 years of Games
13	Officially graphite; really nuclear weapons and military technology	Not part of the Games	Alma Coin	Lived underground for 75 years while Panem thought it was rubble

The wealthy districts are 1, 2 and 4. Districts 11 and 12 are clearly poor, with 12 the poorest and 11 close behind, and 9 is described as poor; the story says little about how 8 and 10 live, and no district comes close to the Capitol. Some numbers that circulate online, like a population and tesserae count for every district, come from a Capitol-themed website rather than the books, so we’ve left them out.

Which districts are the Careers?

The Career districts are 1, 2 and 4. Children there train for the Games at academies run by past victors, and they usually volunteer at 18, when they’ve had the most years of training. Training before the Games is against the rules, but the Capitol looks the other way, probably because trained fighters make better television and the practice drives a wedge between the districts.

In the arena, the Careers normally team up as “the Pack”, grab the Cornucopia’s weapons and supplies in the opening bloodbath, and then hunt everyone else down before turning on each other. They sometimes invite a strong outsider: in the 74th Games they took in Peeta, partly to help them find Katniss.

District 4 is the one place the books and the first film split. In the books, District 4 is a Career district; in the first film, only Districts 1 and 2 produce Careers. In the 75th Games, District 4’s Finnick and Mags sided with Katniss instead of the Pack.

For the reaping, volunteering and the rest of the rules, see how the Hunger Games work. Every Hunger Games guide is on the world page.

Where are the districts on a map?

There is no map in the books, and fan maps disagree. Canon gives only a few fixed points: the Capitol sits in the Rocky Mountains, District 12 in Appalachia, Catching Fire puts District 11 south of 12, and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes lists the four easternmost districts in order: 12, then 8, then 6, then 11.

The full maps you see online come from tie-in material instead: a map in The Hunger Games Adventures, a Facebook game released with the first film in 2012, and maps glimpsed in the Catching Fire film. Those don’t always fit the books. On the train to the Capitol, Katniss sees lights she thinks belong to District 7 or 10, which would put 7 between Appalachia and the Rockies, not in the far Northwest where the game puts it.

So treat the table below as the tie-in game’s map, not canon:

District	Where the 2012 tie-in game’s map puts it
1	Montana, Idaho and the north of Utah and Wyoming
2	Colorado and New Mexico, just south of the Capitol
3	Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Minnesota
4	The west coast: California and Oregon
5	Arizona and southern Utah
6	Michigan, Wisconsin and southern Ontario
7	The Pacific Northwest and southern British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan
8	Kansas, Missouri, southern Illinois and Tennessee
9	The Great Plains: Nebraska, the Dakotas and southern Manitoba
10	Western Texas and northern and central Mexico
11	The Gulf Coast, from Oklahoma and Arkansas to Georgia
12	Kentucky, West Virginia, southern Ohio and Virginia
13	New York and parts of Ontario and Quebec

Panem is also smaller than North America today. Katniss says the seas rose and swallowed land, and the tie-in maps show much of the coastline under water, including all of Florida.

Where do Peacekeepers come from?

Most Peacekeepers come from District 2, with a large share recruited in the Capitol and a few from other districts. That’s District 2’s hidden second industry: publicly it’s the stone-quarrying district, but its villages train and house Peacekeepers, and it makes their weapons. Before the Dark Days the force was headquartered in District 13; afterwards its base moved to District 2 and the Nut.

Peacekeepers serve a 20-year term and can’t marry or have children during it. A recruit from the districts is never posted back to the district they came from. How harsh they are depends on where you live: in District 11 they whip and shoot people for small offences, while District 12’s Peacekeepers long ignored hunting and bought meat at the black market, until a brutal new Head Peacekeeper, Romulus Thread, arrived after Katniss’s first Games.

What happened to District 13?

The Capitol told Panem that District 13 was bombed into ruins at the end of the Dark Days. It wasn’t. District 13 had been the centre of Panem’s weapons industry and nuclear research (the Capitol’s story was that it mined graphite). Near the end of the war it seized a large part of the Capitol’s nuclear weapons and made a secret deal: it would abandon the other rebels and let its surface be flattened, and in return the Capitol would leave it alone as an independent state.

Its people moved into a vast underground bunker and lived a strict, military life there for 75 years. Because of the deal, District 13 never sent a single tribute to the Hunger Games. Panem’s TV kept showing the same smoking ruins, and in Catching Fire two runaways from District 8 notice the same mockingjay flying through every broadcast, a hint that the footage was old.

In Mockingjay, District 13 leads the Second Rebellion, and after the Capitol falls it rejoins Panem. The Hunger Games are abolished, District 8’s Commander Paylor becomes president, and District 12, rebuilt after the Capitol firebombed it, switches from coal to making medicine.

Why is it called Panem?

The name comes from the Latin phrase panem et circenses, “bread and circuses”. It describes keeping people quiet with food and entertainment instead of rights. In Panem, the Capitol’s citizens get the bread and the show; the districts supply the bread and, through the Hunger Games, their children are the show.

The Roman echoes run through the rest of the setting too: the Games recall gladiator fights, the districts around the Capitol work like Rome’s provinces, and many Capitol and District 2 names (Coriolanus, Seneca, Cato, Brutus) are Roman.

Where to go next

• How the Hunger Games work: the reaping, tesserae and the Careers’ training.
• Every Quarter Quell explained: the 25th, 50th and 75th Games side by side.
• Sunrise on the Reaping explained: what to know about Haymitch’s Games before you watch.
• Everything else is on the Hunger Games world page.