It encompassed 71,936 square kilometres (27,775 sq mi) in area and had a population of 2,733,612 inhabitants.

During the grain harvest, thousands of agricultural laborers from the parts of the Empire found work in the area.

The cities of Odessa and Nikolayev (in 1803–1861) and their surrounding vicinity were governed separately: Odessa by a gradonachalnik (Russian: градоначальник), answerable directly to the tsar and (from 1822) the governor-general of Novorossiya and Bessarabia, and Nikolayev by a military governor.

In 1925, the Odessa Governorate was abolished, and its territory was divided into six okruhas: Kherson, Kryvyi Rih, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Pershotravneve, and Zinoviivske.

In the 1850s it consisted of Ukrainians (68–75 %), Romanians (8–11 %), Russians (3–7 %), Jews (6 %), Germans (4 %), Bulgarians (2 %), Poles, Greeks, and Gypsies.